We address the model checking problem for shared memory concurrent programs
modeled as multi-pushdown systems. We consider here boolean programs with a
finite number of threads and recursive procedures. It is well-known that the
model checking problem is undecidable for this class of programs. In this
paper, we investigate the decidability and the complexity of this problem under
the assumption of bounded context-switching defined by Qadeer and Rehof, and of
phase-boundedness proposed by La Torre et al. On the model checking of such
systems against temporal logics and in particular branching time logics such as
the modal μ-calculus or CTL has received little attention. It is known that
parity games, which are closely related to the modal μ-calculus, are
decidable for the class of bounded-phase systems (and hence for bounded-context
switching as well), but with non-elementary complexity (Seth). A natural
question is whether this high complexity is inevitable and what are the ways to
get around it. This paper addresses these questions and unfortunately, and
somewhat surprisingly, it shows that branching model checking for MPDSs is
inherently an hard problem with no easy solution. We show that parity games on
MPDS under phase-bounding restriction is non-elementary. Our main result shows
that model checking a k context bounded MPDS against a simple fragment of
CTL, consisting of formulas that whose temporal operators come from the set
{\EF, \EX}, has a non-elementary lower bound