This work deals with evaluating the effectiveness of a new verification algorithm called slice--n--dice. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of slice--n--dice, a vector clock POR was implemented to compare it against. The first paper contained in this work was published in ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes and discusses the implementation of the vector clock POR. The results of this paper show the vector clock POR performing better than the POR in Java Pathfinder by at least a factor of two. The second paper discusses the implementation of slice--n--dice and compares it against other verification techniques. The results show that slice--n--dice performs better than the other verification methods in terms of states explored and runtime when there is no error in the program or little thread interaction is needed in order for the error to manifest.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computing and Information Science / John M. Hatcliff / With the advent of multi-core processors and rich language support for concurrency, the paradigm of concurrent programming has arrived; however, the cost of developing and maintaining concurrent programs is still high. Simultaneously, the increase in social ubiquity of computing is reducing the "time-to-market" factor while demanding stronger correctness requirements. These effects are amplified with ever-growing size of software systems. Consequently, there is (will be) a rise in the demand for scalable and accurate techniques to enable faster development and maintenance of correct large scale concurrent software. This dissertation presents a collection of scalable and accurate approaches to tackle the above situation. Primarily, the approaches are focused on discovering dependences (relations) between various parts of the software/program and leveraging the dependences to improve maintenance and development tasks via program slicing (comprehension) and verification. Briefly, the proposed approaches are embodied in the following specific contributions: 1. New trace-based foundation for control dependences. 2. An equivalence class based analysis to efficiently and accurately calculate escape information and intra- and inter-thread dependences. 3. A new parametric data flow style slicing algorithm with various extensions to uniformly and easily realize and reason about most existing forms of static sequential and concurrent slicing. 4. A new generic notion of property/trace sensitivity to represent and reason about richer forms of context sensitivity. 5. Program dependence based partial order reduction techniques to enable efficient and accurate state space exploration in both static and dynamic mode. In an attempt to simplify the approaches, they have been based on the basic concepts/ideas of the affected techniques (e.g. program slicing is a rooted transitive closure of dependence relation). As trace-based reasoning is well suited for concurrent systems, an attempt has been made to explore trace-based reasoning wherever possible. While providing a rigorous theoretical presentation of these techniques, this effort also validates the techniques by implementing them in a robust tool framework called Indus (available from http://indus.projects.cis.ksu.edu) and then providing experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques on various concurrent applications. Given the current trend towards concurrent programming and social ubiquity of computing, the approaches proposed in this dissertation provide a foundation for collectively attacking scalability, accuracy, and soundness challenges in current and emerging systems.

Les applications de transmission de messages distribués font partie du courant dominant des technologies de l'information car elles exploitent la puissance des systèmes informatiques parallèles pour produire des performances plus élevées. La conception de programmes distribués reste difficile car les développeurs doivent raisonner sur la concurrence, le non-déterminisme, la distribution de données… qui sont les principales caractéristiques des programmes distribués. En outre, il est pratiquement impossible de garantir l'exactitude de tels programmes via des approches de test classiques, car il est possible que l'on n'atteigne jamais avec succès l'exécution qui conduit à des comportements indésirables dans les programmes. Il existe donc un besoin de techniques de vérification plus puissantes. La vérification des modèles est l'une des méthodes formelles qui permet de vérifier automatiquement et efficacement certaines propriétés des modèles de systèmes informatiques en explorant tous les comportements possibles (états et transitions) du modèle de système. Cependant, les espaces d'état augmentent de façon exponentielle avec le nombre de processus simultanés, conduisant à une «explosion de l'espace d'état» .La réduction dynamique de l'ordre partiel basée sur le dépliage (UDPOR) est une technique récente mélangeant la réduction dynamique de l'ordre partiel (DPOR) avec des concepts de théorie de la concurrence tels que dépliages pour atténuer efficacement l'explosion de l'espace d'états lors de la vérification des modèles de programmes simultanés. Il est optimal dans le sens où chaque trace de Mazurkiewicz, c'est-à-dire une classe d'entrelacements équivalents en commutant des actions indépendantes adjacentes, est explorée exactement une fois. Et elle s'applique aux programmes en cours d'exécution, pas seulement aux modèles de programmes.La thèse vise à adapter UDPOR pour vérifier les programmes distribués asynchrones (par exemple les programmes MPI) dans le cadre du simulateur SIMGRID d'applications distribuées. Pour ce faire, un modèle de programmation abstrait de programmes distribués asynchrones est défini et formalisé en langage TLA +, permettant de définir avec précision une relation d'indépendance, ingrédient principal de la sémantique concurrentielle. Ensuite, l'adaptation de l'UDPOR, impliquant la construction d'un dépliage, est rendue efficace par une analyse précise des dépendances dans le modèle de programmation, permettant des calculs efficaces d'opérations habituellement coûteuses. Un prototype d'implémentation d'UDPOR adapté aux programmes asynchrones distribués a été développé, donnant des résultats expérimentaux prometteurs sur un ensemble significatif de références. / Distributed message passing applications are in the mainstream of information technology since they exploit the power of parallel computer systems to produce higher performance. Designing distributed programs remains challenging because developers have to reason about concurrency, non-determinism, data distribution… that are main characteristics of distributed programs. Besides, it is virtually impossible to ensure the correctness of such programs via classical testing approaches since one may never successfully reach the execution that leads to unwanted behaviors in the programs. There is thus a need for more powerful verification techniques. Model-checking is one of the formal methods that allows to verify automatically and effectively some properties on models of computer systems by exploring all possible behaviors (states and transitions) of the system model. However, state spaces increase exponentially with the number of concurrent processes, leading to “state space explosion”.Unfolding-based Dynamic Partial Order Reduction (UDPOR) is a recent technique mixing Dynamic Partial Order Reduction (DPOR) with concepts of concurrency theory such as unfoldings to efficiently mitigate state space explosion in model-checking of concurrent programs. It is optimal in the sense that each Mazurkiewicz trace, i.e. a class of interleavings equivalent by commuting adjacent independent actions, is explored exactly once. And it is applicable to running programs, not only models of programs.The thesis aims at adapting UDPOR to verify asynchronous distributed programs (e.g. MPI programs) in the setting of the SIMGRID simulator of distributed applications. To do so, an abstract programming model of asynchronous distributed programs is defined and formalized in the TLA+ language, allowing to precisely define an independence relation, a main ingredient of the concurrency semantics. Then, the adaptation of UDPOR, involving the construction of an unfolding, is made efficient by a precise analysis of dependencies in the programming model, allowing efficient computations of usually costly operation. A prototype implementation of UDPOR adapted to distributed asynchronous programs has been developed, giving promising experimental results on a significant set of benchmarks.

We propose a fully automated and dynamic method for generating likely invariants from multithreaded programs and then leveraging these invariants to infer atomic regions and diagnose concurrency errors in the software code. Although existing methods for dynamic invariant generation perform reasonably well on sequential programs, for multithreaded programs, their effectiveness often reduces dramatically in terms of both the number of invariants that they can generate and the likelihood of them being true invariants. We solve this problem by developing a new dynamic invariant generator, which consists of a new LLVM based code instrumentation tool, an INSPECT based thread interleaving explorer, and a customized inference engine inside Daikon. We have evaluated the resulting system on public domain multithreaded C/C++ benchmarks. Our experiments show that the new method is effective in generating high-quality invariants. Furthermore, the state and transition invariants generated by our new method have been proved useful both in error diagnosis and in identifying likely atomic regions in the concurrent software code. / Master of Science

The thesis presents xavier, a novel tool-set for model checking of concurrent x86-64 assembly programs, via Partial Order Reduction (POR). xavier{} presents a realistic platform for systematically exploring and analyzing the state-space of concurrent x86 assembly programs, with the aim of detecting bugs via assertion failures in mainstream programs. Recently, a number of state-of-the-art model checking solutions have been introduced to efficiently explore the state-space of concurrent programs, using POR algorithms. However, such solutions are inefficient while analyzing stateful programming languages, such as the x86 assembly language, due to their low level of abstraction. To this end, xavier{} makes two contributions: i) a novel order-sensitivity based POR algorithm, that is applicable to concurrent x86 assembly, ii) an x86 machine-model that can accurately perform relaxed-consistency emulation of concurrent x86 assembly, without the need for any translations. We demonstrate the applicability of xavier{} through an evaluation on several classical mutual-exclusion benchmarks and mainstream benchmarks from the Userspace Read-Copy-Update (URCU) concurrency library, where the benchmarks range from $250-3700$ lines of x86 assembly. The framework is the first that supports systematic model checking of concurrent x86 assembly programs, and the effectiveness of xavier{} is demonstrated by reproducing a concurrency issue of threads accessing intermediate states in the URCU library, which stems from an assumption violation. / Master of Science / Sound verification of multi-threaded programs necessitate a systematic analysis of program state-spaces that result from thread interactions. Consequently, model-checking cite{godefroid1997model, Clarke2018} has been one of the prominent methods used to tackle the verification of multi-threaded programs. However, existing model-checking solutions are inefficient while analyzing stateful programming languages, such as the x86 assembly language, due to the solutions' higher level of abstraction. Therefore, the thesis presents xavier, a novel tool-set and a realistic platform for systematically exploring and analyzing the state-space of mainstream concurrent x86 assembly programs, with the aim of detecting bugs via assertion failures. To this end, xavier{} makes two contributions: i) a novel order-sensitivity based Partial Order Reduction algorithm, which efficiently explores the state space of concurrent x86 assembly, ii) an x86 machine-model that can accurately emulate the execution of concurrent x86 assembly, without the need for any translations. We demonstrate the applicability of xavier{} through an evaluation on several classical mutual-exclusion and mainstream benchmarks from the Userspace Read-Copy-Update (URCU) concurrency library, where the benchmarks range from $250-3700$ lines of x86 assembly. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of xavier{} by reproducing a concurrency issue in the URCU library, which manifests as a result of an assumption violation.

Stateless model checking is a technique for testing and verifying concurrent programs, based on exploring the different ways in which operations executed by the processes of a concurrent program can be scheduled. The goal of the technique is to expose all behaviours that can be a result of scheduling non-determinism. As the number of possible schedulings is huge, however, techniques that reduce the number of schedulings that must be explored to achieve verification have been developed. Dynamic partial order reduction (DPOR) is a prominent such technique. This dissertation presents a number of improvements to dynamic partial order reduction that significantly increase the effectiveness of stateless model checking. Central among these improvements are the Source and Optimal DPOR algorithms (and the theoretical framework behind them) and a technique that allows the observability of the interference of operations to be used in dynamic partial order reduction. Each of these techniques can exponentially decrease the number of schedulings that need to be explored to verify a concurrent program. The dissertation also presents a simple bounding technique that is compatible with DPOR algorithms and effective for finding bugs in concurrent programs, if the number of schedulings is too big to make full verification possible in a reasonable amount of time, even when the improved algorithms are used. All improvements have been implemented in Concuerror, a tool for applying stateless model checking to Erlang programs. In order to increase the effectiveness of the tool, the interference of the high-level operations of the Erlang/OTP implementation is examined, classified and precisely characterized. Aspects of the implementation of the tool are also described. Finally, a use case is presented, showing how Concuerror was used to find bugs and verify key correctness properties in repair techniques for the CORFU chain replication protocol. / UPMARC / RELEASE

The factored state representation and concurrency semantics of Petri nets are closely related to those of classical planning models, yet automated planning and Petri net analysis have developed independently, with minimal and mainly unconvincing attempts at crossfertilisation. This thesis exploits the relationship between the formal reachability problem, and the automated planning problem, via Petri net unfolding, which is an attractive reachability analysis method for highly concurrent systems as it facilitates reasoning about independent sub-problems. The first contribution of this thesis is the theory of directed unfolding: controlling the unfolding process with informative strategies, for the purpose of optimality and increased efficiency. The second contribution is the application of directed unfolding to automated planning. Inspired by well-known planning heuristics, this thesis shows how problem specific information can be employed to guide unfolding, in response to the formal problem of developing efficient, directed reachability analysis methods for concurrent systems. Complimenting this theoretical work, this thesis presents a new forward search method for partial order planning which can be exponentially more efficient than state space search. Our suite of planners based on directed unfolding can perform optimal and suboptimal classical planning subject to arbitrary action costs, optimal temporal planning with respect to arbitrary action durations, and address probabilistic planning via replanning for the most likely path. Empirical results reveal directed unfolding is competitive with current state of the art automated planning systems, and can solve Petri net reachability problems beyond the reach of the original “blind” unfolding technique. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2008

La conception d'algorithmes pour les systèmes concurrents et répartis est subtile et difficile. Ces systèmes sont enclins à des blocages et à des conditions de course et sont par conséquent difficiles à reproduire La vérification formelle est une technique essentielle pour modéliser le système et ses propriétés et s'assurer de sa correction au moyen du model checking. Des langages formels tels TLA+ permettent de décrire des algorithmes compliqués de manière assez concise, mais les concepteurs d'algorithmes trouvent souvent difficile de modéliser un algorithme par un ensemble de formules. Dans ce mémoire nous présentons le langage PlusCal-2 qui vise à allier la simplicité de pseudo-code à la capacité d'être vérifié formellement. PlusCal-2 améliore le langage algorithmique PlusCal conçu par Lamport en levant certaines restrictions de ce langage et en y ajoutant de nouvelles constructions. Notre langage est destiné à la description d'algorithmes à un niveau élevé d'abstraction. Sa syntaxe ressemble à du pseudo-code mais il est tout à fait expressif et doté d'une sémantique formelle. Pour calculer la dépendance conditionnelle pour les algorithmes en PlusCal-2 nous exploitons des informations sur la localité des actions et nous générons des prédicats d'indépendance. Nous proposons également une adaptation d'un algorithme de réduction par ordre partiel dynamique pour une variante du model checker TLC. Enfin, nous proposons une variante d'un algorithme de réduction par ordre partiel statique s'appuyant sur une relation de dépendance constante, et son implantation au sein de TLC. Nous présentons nos résultats expérimentaux et une preuve de correction / Designing sound algorithms for concurrent and distributed systems is subtle and challenging. These systems are prone to deadlocks and race conditions, and are therefore hard to reproduce. Formal verification is a key technique to model the system and its properties and then perform verification by means of model checking. Formal languages like TLA+ have the ability to describe complicated algorithms quite concisely, but algorithm designers often find it difficult to model an algorithm in the form of formulas. In this thesis, we present PlusCal-2 that aims at being similar to pseudo-code while being formally verifiable. PlusCal-2 improves upon Lamport?s PlusCal algorithm language by lifting some of its restrictions and adding new constructs. Our language is intended for describing algorithms at a high level of abstraction. Finite instances of algorithms described in PlusCal-2 can be verified through the TLC model checker. The second contribution presented in this thesis is a study of partial-order reduction methods using conditional and constant dependency relation. To compute conditional dependency for PlusCal-2 algorithms, we exploit their locality information and present them in the form of independence predicates. We also propose an adaptation of a dynamic partial-order reduction algorithm for a variant of the tlc model checker. As an alternative to partial order reduction based on conditional dependency, we also describe a variant of a static partial-order reduction algorithm for the tlc model checker that relies on constant dependency relation. We also present our results for the experiments along with the proof of correctness

Sound criteria for partial order reduction for probabilistic concurrent systems have been presented in the literature. Their realization relies on a depth-first search-based approach for generating the reduced model. The drawback of this dynamic approach is that it can hardly be combined with other techniques to tackle the state explosion problem, e.g., symbolic probabilistic model checking with multi-terminal variants of binary decision diagrams. Following the approach presented by Kurshan et al. for non-probabilistic systems, we study partial order reduction techniques for probabilistic concurrent systems that can be realized by a static analysis. The idea is to inject the reduction criteria into the control flow graphs of the processes of the system to be analyzed. We provide the theoretical foundations of static partial order reduction for probabilistic concurrent systems and present algorithms to realize them. Finally, we report on some experimental results.

Sound criteria for partial order reduction for probabilistic concurrent systems have been presented in the literature. Their realization relies on a depth-first search-based approach for generating the reduced model. The drawback of this dynamic approach is that it can hardly be combined with other techniques to tackle the state explosion problem, e.g., symbolic probabilistic model checking with multi-terminal variants of binary decision diagrams. Following the approach presented by Kurshan et al. for non-probabilistic systems, we study partial order reduction techniques for probabilistic concurrent systems that can be realized by a static analysis. The idea is to inject the reduction criteria into the control flow graphs of the processes of the system to be analyzed. We provide the theoretical foundations of static partial order reduction for probabilistic concurrent systems and present algorithms to realize them. Finally, we report on some experimental results.