contributed articles doi:10.1145/1562764.1562783 Writing programs that scale with increasing numbers of cores should be as easy as writing programs for sequential computers.

An asynchronous program is one that contains procedure calls which are not immediately executed from the callsite, but stored and “dispatched” in a non-deterministic order by an external scheduler at a later point. We formalize the problem of interprocedural dataflow analysis for asynchronous programs as AIFDS problems, a generalization of the IFDS problems for interprocedural dataflow analysis. We give an algorithm for computing the precise meet-over-valid-paths solution for any AIFDS instance, as well as a demand-driven algorithm for solving the corresponding demand AIFDS instances. Our algorithm can be easily implemented on top of any existing interprocedural dataflow analysis framework. We have implemented the algorithm on top of BLAST, thereby obtaining the first safety verification tool for unbounded asynchronous programs. Though the problem of solving AIFDS instances is EXPSPACE-hard, we find that in practice our technique can efficiently analyze programs by exploiting standard optimizations of interprocedural dataflow analyses.

Abstract. The reachability problem is undecidable for programs with both recursive procedures and multiple threads communicating through shared memory. Attempts to overcome this problem have been the focus of much recent research. One approach is to use context-bounded reachability, i.e. to consider only those runs in which the active thread changes at most k times, where k is fixed. However, to the best of our knowledge, context-bounded reachability has not been implemented in any tool so far, primarily because its worst-case runtime is prohibitively high, i.e. O(n k), where n is the size of the shared memory. Moreover, existing algorithms for context-bounded reachability do not admit a meaningful symbolic implementation (e.g., using BDDs) to reduce the run-time in practice. In this paper, we propose an improvement that overcomes this problem. We have implemented our approach in the tool jMoped and report on experiments. 1

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We provide a new characterization of scheduling nondeterminism by allowing deterministic schedulers to delay their next-scheduled task. In limiting the delays an otherwise-deterministic scheduler is allowed, we discover concurrency bugs efficiently—by exploring few schedules—and robustly—i.e., independent of the number of tasks, context switches, or buffered events. Our characterization elegantly applies to any systematic exploration (e.g., testing, model checking) of concurrent programs with dynamic task-creation. Additionally, we show that certain delaying schedulers admit efficient reductions from concurrent to sequential program analysis. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.4 [Software Engineering]:

Abstract. We show that the bounded context-switching reachability problem for concurrent finite systems communicating using unbounded FIFO queues is decidable, where in each context a process reads from only one queue (but is allowed to write onto all other queues). Our result also holds when individual processes are finite-state recursive programs provided a process dequeues messages only when its local stack is empty. We then proceed to classify architectures that admit a decidable (unbounded context switching) reachability problem, using the decidability of bounded context switching. We show that the precise class of decidable architectures for recursive programs are the forest architectures, while the decidable architectures for non-recursive programs are those that do not have an undirected cycle. 1

Abstract. We consider the problem of verifying the safety of wellstructured transition systems (WSTS) with auxiliary storage. WSTSs with storage are automata that have (possibly) infinitely many control states along with an auxiliary store, but which have a well-quasi-ordering on the set of control states. The set of reachable configurations of the automaton may themselves not be well-quasi-ordered because of the presence of the extra store. We consider the coverability problem for such systems, which asks if it is possible to reach a control state (with some store value) that covers some given control state. Our main result shows that if control state reachability is decidable for automata with some store and finitely many control states then the coverability problem can be decided for WSTSs (with infinitely many control states) and the same store, provided the ordering on the control states has some special property. The special property we require is defined in terms of the existence of a ranking function compatible with the transition relation. We then show that there are several classes of infinite state systems that can be viewed as WSTSs with an auxiliary storage. These observations can then be used to both reestablish old decidability results, as well as discover new ones. 1

ABSTRACT. Multiset pushdown systems have been introduced by Sen and Viswanathan as an adequate model for asynchronous programs where some procedure calls can be stored as tasks to be processed later. The model is a pushdown system supplied with a multiset of pending tasks. Tasks may be added to the multiset at each transition, whereas a task is taken from the multiset only when the stack is empty. In this paper, we consider an extension of these models where tasks may be of different priority level, and can be preempted at any point of their execution by tasks of higher priority. We investigate the control point reachability problem for these models. Our main result is that this problem is decidable by reduction to the reachability problem for a decidable class of Petri nets with inhibitor arcs. We also identify two subclasses of these models for which the control point reachability problem is reducible respectively to the reachability problem and to the coverability problem for Petri nets (without inhibitor arcs). 1

We provide a new characterization of scheduling nondeterminism by allowing deterministic schedulers to delay their next-scheduled task. By limiting the number of delays that an otherwise-deterministic scheduler is allowed, a bounded-exploration of a concurrent program can be done efficiently—by reduction to an equivalent exploration of a sequential program—and robustly—i.e., not dependent on bounds having to do with the number of threads, context switches, preemptions, or buffered events. Our characterization elegantly handles both event-driven asynchronous programs, and multithreaded programs with preemption and dynamic thread creation. 1

Pushdown systems equip a finite state system with an unbounded stack memory, and are thus infinite state. By recording the call history on the stack, these systems provide a natural model for recursive procedure calls. Model-checking for pushdown systems has been well-studied. The most successful implementation of these techniques is the tool Moped, which has become an important component of verification suites such as Terminator, SLAM and Blast. Higher-order pushdown systems allow a more complex memory structure: a higher-order stack is a stack of lower-order stacks. These systems form a robust hierarchy closely related to the Caucal hierarchy and higher-order recursion schemes. This latter connection demonstrates their importance as models for programs with higher-order functions. We study the global model-checking problem for higher-order pushdown systems. In particular, we show how to compute the winning regions of two-player games with reachability, Büchi and parity conditions. Our approach extends the saturation methods of Bouajjani, Esparza and Maler for order-1 pushdown systems, and Bouajjani and Meyer for higher-order pushdown systems with a single control state. These techniques begin with an automaton recognising (higher-order) stacks,