Article

Automatable verification of sequential consistency

Authors:

Anne E. Condon,

Alan J. HuAuthors Info & Claims

SPAA '01: Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures

Pages 113 - 121

https://doi.org/10.1145/378580.378604

Published: 03 July 2001 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Sequential consistency is a multiprocessor memory model of both practical and theoretical importance. Designing and implementing a memory system that efficiently provides a given memory model is a challenging and error-prone task, so automated verification support would be invaluable. Unfortunately, the general problem of deciding whether a finite-state protocol implements sequential consistency is undecidable. In this paper, we identify a restricted class of protocols for which verifying sequential consistency is decidable. The class includes all published sequentially consistent protocols that are known to us, and we argue why the class is likely to include all real sequentially consistent protocols. In principle, our method can be applied in a completely automated fashion for verification of all implemented protocols.

References

[1]

Sarita V. Adve and Kourosh Gharachorloo. Shared memory consistency models: A tutorial. IEEE Computer, pages 66-76, December 1996.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Yehuda Afek, Geoffrey Brown, and Michael Merritt. Lazy caching. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 15(1), January 1993.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Rajeev Alur, Ken McMillan, and Doron Peled. Model-checking of correctness conditions for concurrent objects. In Eleventh Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 219-228. IEEE, 1996.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Tim Braun, Anne E. Condon, Alan J. Hu, Kai S. Juse, Marius Laza, Michael Leslie, and Rita Sharma. Proving sequential consistency by modelchecking. Technical Report TR-2001-03, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, April 2001.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson. Design and synthesis of synchronization skeletons using branching time temporal logic. In Dexter Kozen, editor, Workshop on Logics of Programs, pages 52-71, May 1981. Published 1982 as Lecture Notes in Computer Science Number 131.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Phillip B. Gibbons and Ephraim Korach. Testing shared memories. SIAM Journal on Computing, 26(4):1208-1244, August 1997.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Thomas A. Henzinger, Shaz Qadeer, and Sriram K. Rajamani. Verifying sequential consistency on shared-memory multiprocessor systems. In Computer-Aided Verification: 11th International Conference, pages 301-315. Springer, 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 1633.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Mark D. Hill. Multiprocessors should support simple memory-consistency models. IEEE Computer, pages 28-34, August 1998.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

Leslie Lamport. How to make amultiprocessor computer that correctly executes multiprocess programs. ACM Transactions on Computer, 28(9):690-691, September 1979.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Marius Laza, Rita Sharma, Anne Condon, and Alan J. Hu. Protocols for which proving sequential consistency is easy. In Workshop on Formal Specification and Verification Methods for Shared Memory Systems. Unpublished Proceedings, October 31, 2000. Workshop affiliated with FMCAD 2000, Austin, TX.]]

Google Scholar

[11]

Ratan Nalumasu, Rajnish Ghughal, Abdel Mokkedem, and Ganesh Gopalakrishnan. The 'test model-checking' approach to the verification of formal memory models of multiprocessors. In Computer-Aided Verification: 10th International Conference, pages 464-476. Springer, 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 1427.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[12]

M. Plakal, D. Sorin, A. Condon, and M. Hill. Lamport Clocks: Verifying a directory cache coherence protocol. In Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, pages 67-76, 1998.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[13]

Shaz Qadeer. On the verification of memory models of shared-memory multiprocessors. In Workshop on Formal Specification and Verification Methods for Shared Memory Systems. Unpublished Proceedings, October 31, 2000. Workshop affiliated with FMCAD 2000, Austin, TX.]]

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Gope DLipasti M(2014)Atomic SC for simple in-order processors2014 IEEE 20th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA.2014.6835950(404-415)Online publication date: Feb-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA.2014.6835950
Bhadra JTrofimova EAbadir M(2008)Validating power architecture™ technology-based MPSoCs through executable specificationsIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2008.91741816:4(388-396)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVLSI.2008.917418
Chen KMalik SPatra P(2008)Runtime validation of memory ordering using constraint graph checking2008 IEEE 14th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture10.1109/HPCA.2008.4658657(415-426)Online publication date: Feb-2008
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA.2008.4658657
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Proving Sequential Consistency by Model Checking
HLDVT '01: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International High-Level Design Validation and Test Workshop (HLDVT'01)

Sequential consistency is a multiprocessor memory model of both practical and theoretical importance. Unfortunately, the general problem of verifying that a finite-state protocol implements sequential consistency is undecidable, and in practice, ...
Repairing sequential consistency in C/C++11
PLDI '17

The C/C++11 memory model defines the semantics of concurrent memory accesses in C/C++, and in particular supports racy "atomic" accesses at a range of different consistency levels, from very weak consistency ("relaxed") to strong, sequential consistency ...
Efficient sequential consistency using conditional fences
PACT '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation techniques

Among the various memory consistency models, the sequential consistency (SC) model, in which memory operations appear to take place in the order specified by the program, is the most intuitive and enables programmers to reason about their parallel ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SPAA '01: Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures

July 2001

340 pages

ISBN:1581134096

DOI:10.1145/378580

Chairman:
Arnold Rosenberg
Univ. of Massachusetts

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 July 2001

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

SPAA01

Sponsor:

SPAA01: 13th ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures

Crete Island, Greece

Acceptance Rates

SPAA '01 Paper Acceptance Rate 34 of 93 submissions, 37%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 447 of 1,461 submissions, 31%

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

22
Total Citations
View Citations
263
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 03 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Gope DLipasti M(2014)Atomic SC for simple in-order processors2014 IEEE 20th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA.2014.6835950(404-415)Online publication date: Feb-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA.2014.6835950
Bhadra JTrofimova EAbadir M(2008)Validating power architecture™ technology-based MPSoCs through executable specificationsIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2008.91741816:4(388-396)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVLSI.2008.917418
Chen KMalik SPatra P(2008)Runtime validation of memory ordering using constraint graph checking2008 IEEE 14th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture10.1109/HPCA.2008.4658657(415-426)Online publication date: Feb-2008
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA.2008.4658657
Arvind AMaessen J(2006)Memory Model = Instruction Reordering + Store AtomicityACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/1150019.113648934:2(29-40)Online publication date: 1-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1150019.1136489
Bhadra JTrofimova EGiordano LAbadir M(2006)A Trace-Driven Validation Methodology for Multi-Processor SOCS2006 IEEE International SOC Conference10.1109/SOCC.2006.283869(145-148)Online publication date: Sep-2006
https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCC.2006.283869
Arvind AMaessen J(2006)Memory Model = Instruction Reordering + Store AtomicityProceedings of the 33rd annual international symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA.2006.26(29-40)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISCA.2006.26
Chennareddy VDeka J(2006)Formally Verifying the Distributed Shared Memory Weak Consistency Models2006 International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communications10.1109/ADCOM.2006.4289935(455-460)Online publication date: Dec-2006
https://doi.org/10.1109/ADCOM.2006.4289935
Manovit CHangal SGibbons PSpirakis P(2005)Efficient algorithms for verifying memory consistencyProceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures10.1145/1073970.1074011(245-252)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1073970.1074011
Cantin JLipasti MSmith J(2005)The Complexity of Verifying Memory Coherence and ConsistencyIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2005.8616:7(663-671)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2005.86
Sezgin AGopalakrishnan G(2005)On the decidability of shared memory consistency verificationProceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Co-Design10.1109/MEMCOD.2005.1487915(199-208)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MEMCOD.2005.1487915
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Proving Sequential Consistency by Model Checking

Repairing sequential consistency in C/C++11

Efficient sequential consistency using conditional fences

Comments

Published In

Sponsors

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Conference

Acceptance Rates

Other Metrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Cited By

Login options

Full Access

PDF

eReader

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Proving Sequential Consistency by Model Checking

Repairing sequential consistency in C/C++11

Efficient sequential consistency using conditional fences

Comments

Information

Published In

Sponsors

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Conference

Acceptance Rates

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

eReader

Figures

Other

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations