Parallelizing Deadlock Resolution in Symbolic Synthesis of Distributed Programs

Previous work has shown that there are two major complexity barriers in the synthesis of fault-tolerant distributed programs: (1) generation of fault-span, the set of states reachable in the presence of faults, and (2) resolving deadlock states, from where the program has no outgoing transitions. Of these, the former closely resembles with model checking and, hence, techniques for efficient verification are directly applicable to it. Hence, we focus on expediting the latter with the use of multi-core technology. We present two approaches for parallelization by considering different design choices. The first approach is based on the computation of equivalence classes of program transitions (called group computation) that are needed due to the issue of distribution (i.e., inability of processes to atomically read and write all program variables). We show that in most cases the speedup of this approach is close to the ideal speedup and in some cases it is superlinear. The second approach uses traditional technique of partitioning deadlock states among multiple threads. However, our experiments show that the speedup for this approach is small. Consequently, our analysis demonstrates that a simple approach of parallelizing the group computation is likely to be the effective method for using multi-core computing in the context of deadlock resolution

08332 Abstracts Collection -- Distributed Verification and Grid Computing

From 08/10/2008 to 08/14/2008 the Dagstuhl Seminar 08332 ``Distributed Verification and Grid Computing\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

The design of a neural network compiler

Computer simulation is a flexible and economical way for rapid prototyping and concept evaluation with Neural Network (NN) models. Increasing research on NNs has led to the development of several simulation programs. Not all simulations have the same scope. Some simulations allow only a fixed network model and some are more general. Designing a simulation program for general purpose NN models has become a current trend nowadays because of its flexibility and efficiency. A proper programming language specifically for NN models is preferred since the existing high-level languages such as C are for NN designers from a strong computer background. The program translations for NN languages come from combinations which are either interpreter and/or compiler. There are also various styles of programming languages such as a procedural, functional, descriptive and object-oriented. The main focus of this thesis is to study the feasibility of using a compiler method for the development of a general-purpose simulator - NEUCOMP that compiles the program written as a list of mathematical specifications of the particular NN model and translates it into a chosen target program. The language supported by NEUCOMP is based on a procedural style. Information regarding the list of mathematical statements required by the NN models are written in the program. The mathematical statements used are represented by scalar, vector and matrix assignments. NEUCOMP translates these expressions into actual program loops. NEUCOMP enables compilation of a simulation program written in the NEUCOMP language for any NN model, contains graphical facilities such as portraying the NN architecture and displaying a graph of the result during training and finally to have a program that can run on a parallel shared memory multi-processor system

Concurrent Bounded Model Checking

The Definitive Version can be found in the ACM Digital Library here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2693208.2693240issue_date: January 2015 numpages: 5 acmid: 2693240 keywords: Bounded Model Checking, Concurrency, Symbolic Executionissue_date: January 2015 numpages: 5 acmid: 2693240 keywords: Bounded Model Checking, Concurrency, Symbolic Executionissue_date: January 2015 numpages: 5 acmid: 2693240 keywords: Bounded Model Checking, Concurrency, Symbolic Executio

Learning port-Hamiltonian systems -- algorithms

In this article we study the possibilities of recovering the structure of port-Hamiltonian systems starting from ``unlabelled'' ordinary differential equations describing mechanical systems. The algorithm we suggest solves the problem in two phases. It starts by constructing the connectivity structure of the system using machine learning methods -- producing thus a graph of interconnected subsystems. Then this graph is enhanced by recovering the Hamiltonian structure of each subsystem as well as the corresponding ports. This second phase relies heavily on results from symplectic and Poisson geometry that we briefly sketch. And the precise solutions can be constructed using methods of computer algebra and symbolic computations. The algorithm permits to extend the port-Hamiltonian formalism to generic ordinary differential equations, hence introducing eventually a new concept of normal forms of ODEs.Comment: to appear in Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, 1, 202

LTSmin: high-performance language-independent model checking

In recent years, the LTSmin model checker has been extended with support for several new modelling languages, including probabilistic (Mapa) and timed systems (Uppaal). Also, connecting additional language front-ends or ad-hoc state-space generators to LTSmin was simplified using custom C-code. From symbolic and distributed reachability analysis and minimisation, LTSmin’s functionality has developed into a model checker with multi-core algorithms for on-the-fly LTL checking with partial-order reduction, and multi-core symbolic checking for the modal μ calculus, based on the multi-core decision diagram package Sylvan.\ud In LTSmin, the modelling languages and the model checking algorithms are connected through a Partitioned Next-State Interface (Pins), that allows to abstract away from language details in the implementation of the analysis algorithms and on-the-fly optimisations. In the current paper, we present an overview of the toolset and its recent changes, and we demonstrate its performance and versatility in two case studies

07241 Abstracts Collection -- Tools for the Model-based Development of Certifiable, Dependable Systems

From June 10th to June 15th 2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07241 ``Tools for the Model-based Development of Certifiable, Dependable Systems\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

HPC-GAP: engineering a 21st-century high-performance computer algebra system

Symbolic computation has underpinned a number of key advances in Mathematics and Computer Science. Applications are typically large and potentially highly parallel, making them good candidates for parallel execution at a variety of scales from multi-core to high-performance computing systems. However, much existing work on parallel computing is based around numeric rather than symbolic computations. In particular, symbolic computing presents particular problems in terms of varying granularity and irregular task sizes thatdo not match conventional approaches to parallelisation. It also presents problems in terms of the structure of the algorithms and data. This paper describes a new implementation of the free open-source GAP computational algebra system that places parallelism at the heart of the design, dealing with the key scalability and cross-platform portability problems. We provide three system layers that deal with the three most important classes of hardware: individual shared memory multi-core nodes, mid-scale distributed clusters of (multi-core) nodes, and full-blown HPC systems, comprising large-scale tightly-connected networks of multi-core nodes. This requires us to develop new cross-layer programming abstractions in the form of new domain-specific skeletons that allow us to seamlessly target different hardware levels. Our results show that, using our approach, we can achieve good scalability and speedups for two realistic exemplars, on high-performance systems comprising up to 32,000 cores, as well as on ubiquitous multi-core systems and distributed clusters. The work reported here paves the way towards full scale exploitation of symbolic computation by high-performance computing systems, and we demonstrate the potential with two major case studies

Replicable parallel branch and bound search

Combinatorial branch and bound searches are a common technique for solving global optimisation and decision problems. Their performance often depends on good search order heuristics, refined over decades of algorithms research. Parallel search necessarily deviates from the sequential search order, sometimes dramatically and unpredictably, e.g. by distributing work at random. This can disrupt effective search order heuristics and lead to unexpected and highly variable parallel performance. The variability makes it hard to reason about the parallel performance of combinatorial searches. This paper presents a generic parallel branch and bound skeleton, implemented in Haskell, with replicable parallel performance. The skeleton aims to preserve the search order heuristic by distributing work in an ordered fashion, closely following the sequential search order. We demonstrate the generality of the approach by applying the skeleton to 40 instances of three combinatorial problems: Maximum Clique, 0/1 Knapsack and Travelling Salesperson. The overheads of our Haskell skeleton are reasonable: giving slowdown factors of between 1.9 and 6.2 compared with a class-leading, dedicated, and highly optimised C++ Maximum Clique solver. We demonstrate scaling up to 200 cores of a Beowulf cluster, achieving speedups of 100x for several Maximum Clique instances. We demonstrate low variance of parallel performance across all instances of the three combinatorial problems and at all scales up to 200 cores, with median Relative Standard Deviation (RSD) below 2%. Parallel solvers that do not follow the sequential search order exhibit far higher variance, with median RSD exceeding 85% for Knapsack