Quick verification of concurrent programs by iteratively relaxed scheduling

Metzler, P. and Saissi, H. and Bokor, P. and Suri, Neeraj (2017) Quick verification of concurrent programs by iteratively relaxed scheduling. In: 2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). IEEE, pp. 776-781. ISBN 9781538639764

Abstract

The most prominent advantage of software verification over testing is a rigorous check of every possible software behavior. However, large state spaces of concurrent systems, due to non-deterministic scheduling, result in a slow automated verification process. Therefore, verification introduces a large delay between completion and deployment of concurrent software. This paper introduces a novel iterative approach to verification of concurrent programs that drastically reduces this delay. By restricting the execution of concurrent programs to a small set of admissible schedules, verification complexity and time is drastically reduced. Iteratively adding admissible schedules after their verification eventually restores non-deterministic scheduling. Thereby, our framework allows to find a sweet spot between a low verification delay and sufficient execution time performance. Our evaluation of a prototype implementation on well-known benchmark programs shows that after verifying only few schedules of the program, execution time overhead is competitive to existing deterministic multi-threading frameworks. © 2017 IEEE.