Title
Automatic Discovery of Transition Symmetry in Multithreaded Programs Using Dynamic Analysis
Abstract
While symmetry reduction has been established to be an important technique for reducing the search space in model checking, its application in concurrent software verification is still limited, due to the difficulty of specifying symmetry in realistic software. We propose an algorithm for automatically discovering and applying transition symmetry in multithreaded programs during dynamic model checking. Our main idea is using dynamic program analysis to identify a permutation of variables and labels of the program that entails syntactic equivalence among the residual code of threads and to check whether the local states of threads are equivalent under the permutation. The new transition symmetry discovery algorithm can bring substantial state space savings during dynamic verification of concurrent programs. We have implemented the new algorithm in the dynamic model checker Inspect . Our preliminary experiments show that this algorithm can successfully discover transition symmetries that are hard or otherwise cumbersome to identify manually, and can significantly reduce the model checking time while using Inspect to examine realistic multithreaded applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-02652-2_22
SPIN
Keywords
Field
DocType
dynamic model checker,dynamic model checking,dynamic analysis,transition symmetry,dynamic program analysis,dynamic verification,new transition symmetry discovery,new algorithm,model checking time,multithreaded programs,automatic discovery,model checking,symmetry reduction,software verification,search space,state space
Model checking,Computer science,Permutation,Thread (computing),Theoretical computer science,Software,Equivalence (measure theory),State space,Dynamic program analysis,Software verification
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
5578
0302-9743
15
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.62
23
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yu Yang11215.95
Xiaofang Chen2150.62
Ganesh Gopalakrishnan31619130.11
Chao Wang4110961.81