Inferring Synchronization under Limited Observability

  • Authors:
  • Martin Vechev;Eran Yahav;Greta Yorsh

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,

  • Venue:
  • TACAS '09 Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems: Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2009,
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of automatically inferring synchronization for concurrent programs. Given a program and a specification, we infer synchronization that avoids all interleavings violating the specification, but permits as many valid interleavings as possible. We let the user specify an upper bound on the cost of synchronization, which may limit the observability -- what observations on program state can be made by the synchronization code. We present an algorithm that infers, under certain conditions, the maximally permissive synchronization for a given cost. We implemented a prototype of our approach and applied it to infer synchronization in a number of small programs.