Future-based Static Analysis of Message Passing Programs

Wytse Oortwijn
(University of Twente)
Stefan Blom
(University of Twente)
Marieke Huisman
(University of Twente)

Message passing is widely used in industry to develop programs consisting of several distributed communicating components. Developing functionally correct message passing software is very challenging due to the concurrent nature of message exchanges. Nonetheless, many safety-critical applications rely on the message passing paradigm, including air traffic control systems and emergency services, which makes proving their correctness crucial. We focus on the modular verification of MPI programs by statically verifying concrete Java code. We use separation logic to reason about local correctness and define abstractions of the communication protocol in the process algebra used by mCRL2. We call these abstractions futures as they predict how components will interact during program execution. We establish a provable link between futures and program code and analyse the abstract futures via model checking to prove global correctness. Finally, we verify a leader election protocol to demonstrate our approach.

In Dominic Orchard and Nobuko Yoshida: Proceedings of the Ninth workshop on Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency- and Communication-cEntric Software (PLACES 2016), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 8th April 2016, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 211, pp. 65–72.
Published: 17th June 2016.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.211.7 bibtex PDF
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