1 research outputs found
Semantics, Specification, and Bounded Verification of Concurrent Libraries in Replicated Systems
Geo-replicated systems provide a number of desirable properties such as
globally low latency, high availability, scalability, and built-in fault
tolerance. Unfortunately, programming correct applications on top of such
systems has proven to be very challenging, in large part because of the weak
consistency guarantees they offer. These complexities are exacerbated when we
try to adapt existing highly-performant concurrent libraries developed for
shared-memory environments to this setting. The use of these libraries,
developed with performance and scalability in mind, is highly desirable. But,
identifying a suitable notion of correctness to check their validity under a
weakly consistent execution model has not been well-studied, in large part
because it is problematic to naively transplant criteria such as
linearizability that has a useful interpretation in a shared-memory context to
a distributed one where the cost of imposing a (logical) global ordering on all
actions is prohibitive.
In this paper, we tackle these issues by proposing appropriate semantics and
specifications for highly-concurrent libraries in a weakly-consistent,
replicated setting. We use these specifications to develop a static analysis
framework that can automatically detect correctness violations of library
implementations parameterized with respect to the different consistency
policies provided by the underlying system. We use our framework to analyze the
behavior of a number of highly non-trivial library implementations of stacks,
queues, and exchangers. Our results provide the first demonstration that
automated correctness checking of concurrent libraries in a weakly
geo-replicated setting is both feasible and practical.Comment: Extended Version of CAV20 Pape