Compositional Verification for Timed Systems Based on Automatic Invariant Generation

We propose a method for compositional verification to address the state space explosion problem inherent to model-checking timed systems with a large number of components. The main challenge is to obtain pertinent global timing constraints from the timings in the components alone. To this end, we make use of auxiliary clocks to automatically generate new invariants which capture the constraints induced by the synchronisations between components. The method has been implemented in the RTD-Finder tool and successfully experimented on several benchmarks

Lower Bounds for Shared-Memory Leader Election Under Bounded Write Contention

This paper gives tight logarithmic lower bounds on the solo step complexity of leader election in an asynchronous shared-memory model with single-writer multi-reader (SWMR) registers, for both deterministic and randomized obstruction-free algorithms. The approach extends to lower bounds for deterministic and randomized obstruction-free algorithms using multi-writer registers under bounded write concurrency, showing a trade-off between the solo step complexity of a leader election algorithm, and the worst-case number of stalls incurred by a processor in an execution

An Almost Tight RMR Lower Bound for Abortable Test-And-Set

We prove a lower bound of Omega(log n/log log n) for the remote memory reference (RMR) complexity of abortable test-and-set (leader election) in the cache-coherent (CC) and the distributed shared memory (DSM) model. This separates the complexities of abortable and non-abortable test-and-set, as the latter has constant RMR complexity [Wojciech Golab et al., 2010]. Golab, Hendler, Hadzilacos and Woelfel [Wojciech M. Golab et al., 2012] showed that compare-and-swap can be implemented from registers and test-and-set objects with constant RMR complexity. We observe that a small modification to that implementation is abortable, provided that the used test-and-set objects are atomic (or abortable). As a consequence, using existing efficient randomized wait-free implementations of test-and-set [George Giakkoupis and Philipp Woelfel, 2012], we obtain randomized abortable compare-and-swap objects with almost constant (O(log^* n)) RMR complexity

Better Sooner Rather Than Later

This article unifies and generalizes fundamental results related to $n$-process asynchronous crash-prone distributed computing. More precisely, it proves that for every $0\leq k \leq n$, assuming that process failures occur only before the number of participating processes bypasses a predefined threshold that equals $n-k$ (a participating process is a process that has executed at least one statement of its code), an asynchronous algorithm exists that solves consensus for $n$ processes in the presence of $f$ crash failures if and only if $f \leq k$. In a very simple and interesting way, the "extreme" case $k=0$ boils down to the celebrated FLP impossibility result (1985, 1987). Moreover, the second extreme case, namely $k=n$, captures the celebrated mutual exclusion result by E.W. Dijkstra (1965) that states that mutual exclusion can be solved for $n$ processes in an asynchronous read/write shared memory system where any number of processes may crash (but only) before starting to participate in the algorithm (that is, participation is not required, but once a process starts participating it may not fail). More generally, the possibility/impossibility stated above demonstrates that more failures can be tolerated when they occur earlier in the computation (hence the title).Comment: 10 page

Recoverable, Abortable, and Adaptive Mutual Exclusion with Sublogarithmic RMR Complexity

We present the first recoverable mutual exclusion (RME) algorithm that is simultaneously abortable, adaptive to point contention, and with sublogarithmic RMR complexity. Our algorithm has O(min(K,log_W N)) RMR passage complexity and O(F + min(K,log_W N)) RMR super-passage complexity, where K is the number of concurrent processes (point contention), W is the size (in bits) of registers, and F is the number of crashes in a super-passage. Under the standard assumption that W = ?(log N), these bounds translate to worst-case O((log N)/(log log N)) passage complexity and O(F + (log N)/(log log N)) super-passage complexity. Our key building blocks are: - A D-process abortable RME algorithm, for D ? W, with O(1) passage complexity and O(1+F) super-passage complexity. We obtain this algorithm by using the Fetch-And-Add (FAA) primitive, unlike prior work on RME that uses Fetch-And-Store (FAS/SWAP). - A generic transformation that transforms any abortable RME algorithm with passage complexity of B < W, into an abortable RME lock with passage complexity of O(min(K,B))

Information theoretic treatment of tripartite systems and quantum channels

A Holevo measure is used to discuss how much information about a given POVM on system $a$ is present in another system $b$, and how this influences the presence or absence of information about a different POVM on $a$ in a third system $c$. The main goal is to extend information theorems for mutually unbiased bases or general bases to arbitrary POVMs, and especially to generalize "all-or-nothing" theorems about information located in tripartite systems to the case of \emph{partial information}, in the form of quantitative inequalities. Some of the inequalities can be viewed as entropic uncertainty relations that apply in the presence of quantum side information, as in recent work by Berta et al. [Nature Physics 6, 659 (2010)]. All of the results also apply to quantum channels: e.g., if \EC accurately transmits certain POVMs, the complementary channel \FC will necessarily be noisy for certain other POVMs. While the inequalities are valid for mixed states of tripartite systems, restricting to pure states leads to the basis-invariance of the difference between the information about $a$ contained in $b$ and $c$.Comment: 21 pages. An earlier version of this paper attempted to prove our main uncertainty relation, Theorem 5, using the achievability of the Holevo quantity in a coding task, an approach that ultimately failed because it did not account for locking of classical correlations, e.g. see [DiVincenzo et al. PRL. 92, 067902 (2004)]. In the latest version, we use a very different approach to prove Theorem