Title
Verifying distributed programs via canonical sequentialization
Abstract
We introduce canonical sequentialization, a new approach to verifying unbounded, asynchronous, message-passing programs at compile-time. Our approach builds upon the following observation: due the combinatorial explosion in complexity, programmers do not reason about their systems by case-splitting over all the possible execution orders. Instead, correct programs tend to be well-structured so that the programmer can reason about a small number of representative executions, which we call the program’s canonical sequentialization. We have implemented our approach in a tool called Brisk that synthesizes canonical sequentializations for programs written in Haskell, and evaluated it on a wide variety of distributed systems including benchmarks from the literature and implementations of MapReduce, two-phase commit, and a version of the Disco distributed file-system. We show that unlike model checking, which gets prohibitively slow with just 10 processes Brisk verifies the unbounded versions of the benchmarks in tens of milliseconds, yielding the first concurrency verification tool that is fast enough to be integrated into a design-implement-check cycle.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3133934
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Keywords
Field
DocType
asynchronous programs,canonical sequentialization,concurrency,distributed programs,message passing,parameterized systems,program verification,reductions
Asynchronous communication,Model checking,Programmer,Programming language,Commit,Concurrency,Computer science,Haskell,Combinatorial explosion,Message passing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
1
OOPSLA
2475-1421
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.37
30
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexander Bakst1222.07
Klaus von Gleissenthall2213.47
Rami Gökhan Kıcı351.75
Ranjit Jhala42183111.68