GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MULTITHREADED APPLICATIONS

This article contains a brief description of existing graphical methods for presenting multithreaded applications, i.e. Control Flow Graph and Petri nets. These methods will be discussed, and then a way to represent multithreaded applications using the concurrent process system model will be presented. All these methods will be used to present the idea of a multithreaded application that includes the race condition phenomenon. In the summary, all three methods will be compared and subjected to the evaluation, which will depend on whether the given representation will allow to find the mentioned phenomenon

Contributions to the deadlock problem in multithreaded software applications observed as Resource Allocation Systems

Desde el punto de vista de la competencia por recursos compartidos sucesivamente reutilizables, se dice que un sistema concurrente compuesto por procesos secuenciales está en situación de bloqueo si existe en él un conjunto de procesos que están indefinidamente esperando la liberación de ciertos recursos retenidos por miembros del mismo conjunto de procesos. En sistemas razonablemente complejos o distribuidos, establecer una política de asignación de recursos que sea libre de bloqueos puede ser un problema muy difícil de resolver de forma eficiente. En este sentido, los modelos formales, y particularmente las redes de Petri, se han ido afianzando como herramientas fructíferas que permiten abstraer el problema de asignación de recursos en este tipo de sistemas, con el fin de abordarlo analíticamente y proveer métodos eficientes para la correcta construcción o corrección de estos sistemas. En particular, la teoría estructural de redes de Petri se postula como un potente aliado para lidiar con el problema de la explosión de estados inherente a aquéllos. En este fértil contexto han florecido una serie de trabajos que defienden una propuesta metodológica de diseño orientada al estudio estructural y la correspondiente corrección física del problema de asignación de recursos en familias de sistemas muy significativas en determinados contextos de aplicación, como el de los Sistemas de Fabricación Flexible. Las clases de modelos de redes de Petri resultantes asumen ciertas restricciones, con significado físico en el contexto de aplicación para el que están destinadas, que alivian en buena medida la complejidad del problema. En la presente tesis, se intenta acercar ese tipo de aproximación metodológica al diseño de aplicaciones software multihilo libres de bloqueos. A tal efecto, se pone de manifiesto cómo aquellas restricciones procedentes del mundo de los Sistemas de Fabricación Flexible se muestran demasiado severas para aprehender la versatilidad inherente a los sistemas software en lo que respecta a la interacción de los procesos con los recursos compartidos. En particular, se han de resaltar dos necesidades de modelado fundamentales que obstaculizan la mera adopción de antiguas aproximaciones surgidas bajo el prisma de otros dominios: (1) la necesidad de soportar el anidamiento de bucles no desplegables en el interior de los procesos, y (2) la posible compartición de recursos no disponibles en el arranque del sistema pero que son creados o declarados por un proceso en ejecución. A resultas, se identifica una serie de requerimientos básicos para la definición de un tipo de modelos orientado al estudio de sistemas software multihilo y se presenta una clase de redes de Petri, llamada PC2R, que cumple dicha lista de requerimientos, manteniéndose a su vez respetuosa con la filosofía de diseño de anteriores subclases enfocadas a otros contextos de aplicación. Junto con la revisión e integración de anteriores resultados en el nuevo marco conceptual, se aborda el estudio de propiedades inherentes a los sistemas resultantes y su relación profunda con otros tipos de modelos, la confección de resultados y algoritmos eficientes para el análisis estructural de vivacidad en la nueva clase, así como la revisión y propuesta de métodos de resolución de los problemas de bloqueo adaptadas a las particularidades físicas del dominio de aplicación. Asimismo, se estudia la complejidad computacional de ciertas vertientes relacionadas con el problema de asignación de recursos en el nuevo contexto, así como la traslación de los resultados anteriormente mencionados sobre el dominio de la ingeniería de software multihilo, donde la nueva clase de redes permite afrontar problemas inabordables considerando el marco teórico y las herramientas suministradas para subclases anteriormente explotadas

A dynamic petri net model for iterative and interactive distributed multimedia presentation

Object Composition Petri Nets (OCPN), Priority Petri Nets (P-Net), Dynamic OCPN (DOCPN) and Enhanced P-Nets (EP-Net) have extended the original Petri Net to achieve the modeling of media synchronization and asynchronous user interactions during multimedia playback. Dynamic Petri Net (DPN) has been conceptualized to tackle existing problems in these two areas of modeling distributed multimedia systems. DPN features dynamic modeling elements which allows iteration and hence is able to reduce graph sizes of synchronous playback models while allowing greater details to be shown. DPN also introduces asynchronous event handling techniques that are powerful and effective. DPN was used in the design and modeling of a multimedia orchestration tool which is a typical representation of an application that works in a distributed multimedia system

Parameterized verification

The goal of parameterized verification is to prove the correctness of a system specification regardless of the number of its components. The problem is of interest in several different areas: verification of hardware design, multithreaded programs, distributed systems, and communication protocols. The problem is undecidable in general. Solutions for restricted classes of systems and properties have been studied in areas like theorem proving, model checking, automata and logic, process algebra, and constraint solving. In this introduction to the special issue, dedicated to a selection of works from the Parameterized Verification workshop PV \u201914 and PV \u201915, we survey some of the works developed in this research area

A unified view of parameterized verification of abstract models of broadcast communication

We give a unified view of different parameterized models of concurrent and distributed systems with broadcast communication based on transition systems. Based on the resulting formal models, we discuss related verification methods and tools based on abstractions and symbolic state exploration

Performance limitations of block-multithreaded distributed-memory systems

The performance of modern computer systems is increasingly often limited by long latencies of accesses to the memory subsystems. Instruction-level multithreading is an architectural approach to tolerating such long latencies by switching instruction threads rather than waiting for the completion of memory operations. The paper studies performance limitations in distributed-memory block multithreaded systems and determines conditions for such systems to be balanced. Event-driven simulation of a timed Petri net model of a simple distributed-memory system confirms the derived performance result

Petri Nets and Timed Petri Nets in Modeling and Analysis of Concurrent Systems – An Overview

Petri nets are formal models of systems which exhibit concurrent activities. Communication networks, multiprocessor systems, manufacturing systems and dis- tributed databases are simple examples of such systems. As formal models, Petri nets are bipartite directed graphs, in which the two types of vertices represent, in a very gen- eral sense, conditions and events. An event can occur only when all conditions associated with it (represented by arcs directed to the event) are satisfied. An occurrence of an event usually satisfies some other conditions, indicated by arcs directed from the event. So, an occurrence of one event causes some other event to occur, and so on. In order to study performance aspects of systems modeled by Petri nets, the durations of modeled activities must also be taken into account. This can be done in different ways, resulting in different types of temporal nets. In timed Petri nets, occurrence times are associated with events, and the events occur in real–time (as opposed to instantaneous oc- currences in other models). For timed nets with constant or exponentially distributed occurrence times, the state graph of a net is a Markov chain, in which the stationary prob- abilities of states can be determined by standard methods. These stationary probabilities are used for the derivation of many performance characteristics of the model. Analysis of net models based on exhaustive generation of all possible states is called reachability analysis; it provides detailed characterization of model’s behavior, but often re- quires generation and analysis of huge state spaces (in some models the number of states increases exponentially with some model parameters, which is known as “state explo- sion”). Structural analysis determines the properties of net models on the basis of connections among model elements; structural analysis is usually much simpler than reachability analysis, but can be applied only to models satisfying certain properties. If neither reachability nor structural analysis is feasible, discrete–event simulation of timed nets can be used to study the properties of net models. This paper overviews basic concepts of Petri nets, intro- duces timed Petri nets, and provides brief summaries of sev- eral case studies of performance analysis which are discussed in greater detail in other publications of the author

A Generic Framework for Reasoning about Dynamic Networks of Infinite-State Processes

We propose a framework for reasoning about unbounded dynamic networks of infinite-state processes. We propose Constrained Petri Nets (CPN) as generic models for these networks. They can be seen as Petri nets where tokens (representing occurrences of processes) are colored by values over some potentially infinite data domain such as integers, reals, etc. Furthermore, we define a logic, called CML (colored markings logic), for the description of CPN configurations. CML is a first-order logic over tokens allowing to reason about their locations and their colors. Both CPNs and CML are parametrized by a color logic allowing to express constraints on the colors (data) associated with tokens. We investigate the decidability of the satisfiability problem of CML and its applications in the verification of CPNs. We identify a fragment of CML for which the satisfiability problem is decidable (whenever it is the case for the underlying color logic), and which is closed under the computations of post and pre images for CPNs. These results can be used for several kinds of analysis such as invariance checking, pre-post condition reasoning, and bounded reachability analysis.Comment: 29 pages, 5 tables, 1 figure, extended version of the paper published in the the Proceedings of TACAS 2007, LNCS 442