Formal verification of programs that use MPI one-sided communication

Abstract. Formal verification methods based on model checking are applied to analyze the correctness properties of one existing and two new distributed locking protocols implemented using MPI’s one-sided communication. Model checking exposed an overlooked correctness issue with the first of these protocols which was developed relying only on manual reasoning. Model checking helped confirm the basic correctness properties of the two new protocols, while also identifying the remaining problems in them. Our experience is that MPI based programming, especially the tricky and relatively poorly undersood one-sided communication features, stand to gain immensely from model checking. Considering that many other areas of concurrent hardware and software design are now routinely employing model checking, our experience confirms that the MPI community can greatly benefit from the use of formal verification.