Partial order semantics for concurrent program verification

Multiprocessor machines are now predominant, as most laptops, desktops,servers, mobile phones and aircrafts routinely have multiple to many cores.Unfortunately, concurrent programming is error-prone, which now affectseveryone given this trend towards more and more concurrency.Let us mention for example a recent concurrency bug found in the PostgreSQLdatabase (seehttp://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-08/msg00330.php). PostgreSQLis one of the most popular database nowadays, and many websites rely on itscorrect functioning. This bug was particularly difficult to observe (andindeed is not fixed yet) because it only occurred on a multicore machine, and aparticular hardware platform, IBM Power.Reproducing such bugs is as hard as observing them; thus testing can hardlydiscover them. To prove a program free of errors, we would like to deviseautomated techniques that analyse the code without executing it. Thus,we can relieve programmers from the burden of writing the proofs of theirprograms.Yet, automatic verification of concurrent programs represents a challenge,whether it aims at proving the full correctness of a program (e.g. aprogram sorting a list actually sorts the list), or at checking specificproperties (e.g. the program is free of data races) short of fullcorrectness. We focus here on the latter: we would like to enhancethe scalability of tools checking that a concurrent program does not violatecertain safety-critical properties of interest.We would like to show that scalable automatic verification can be achieved byexploiting the rich history of partial orders for modeling concurrency.

多个笔记本电脑，台式机，服务器，手机和飞机通常具有多核。 （seehttp：//archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-08/msg00330.php）。如今，PostgreSqlis是最受欢迎的数据库之一，许多网站都依赖其更高的功能。该错误特别难以观察（并且尚未固定），因为它仅发生在多功能机器上，而公寓硬件平台IBM Power。重新生产此类错误就像观察它们一样困难。因此，测试几乎可以发现它们。为了证明一个没有错误的程序，我们希望在不执行该代码的情况下分析代码的技术。因此，我们可以免除程序员编写其程序的证据的负担。我们将重点放在后者上：我们想增强工具的可扩展性检查，以检查并发程序是否没有违反关键的关键问题，我们希望证明可以通过探索良好的部分订单来实现可扩展的自动验证，以实现建模并发。