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Using Abstract Interpretation to Correct Synchronization Faults

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Book cover Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10145))

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Abstract

We describe a novel use of abstract interpretation in which the abstract domain informs a runtime system to correct synchronization failures. To this end, we first introduce a novel synchronization paradigm, dubbed corrective synchronization, that is a generalization of existing approaches to ensuring serializability. Specifically, the correctness of multi-threaded execution need not be enforced by previous methods that either reduce parallelism (pessimistic) or roll back illegal thread interleavings (optimistic); instead inadmissible states can be altered into admissible ones. In this way, the effects of inadmissible interleavings can be compensated for by modifying the program state as a transaction completes, while accounting for the behavior of concurrent transactions. We have proved that corrective synchronization is serializable and give conditions under which progress is ensured. Next, we describe an abstract interpretation that is able to compute these valid serializable post-states w.r.t. a transaction’s entry state by computing an under-approximation of the serializable intermediate (or final) states as the fixpoint solution over an inter-procedural control-flow graph. These abstract states inform a runtime system that is able to perform state correction dynamically. We have instantiated this setup to clients of a Java-like Concurrent Map data structure to ensure safe composition of map operations. Finally, we report early encouraging results that the approach competes with or out-performs previous pessimistic or optimistic approaches.

P. Ferrara and O. Tripp—The research leading to this paper was conducted while the author was at IBM Research.

E. Koskinen—The research was supported by NSF CCF Award #1421126 and conducted partially while the author was at IBM Research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ConcurrentMap.html.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/DeuceSTM/DeuceSTM.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Julia Srl, Verona, Italy

    Pietro Ferrara

  2. Google Inc., Menlo Park, USA

    Omer Tripp

  3. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, USA

    Peng Liu

  4. Yale University, New Haven, USA

    Eric Koskinen

Authors
  1. Pietro Ferrara
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  2. Omer Tripp
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  3. Peng Liu
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  4. Eric Koskinen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pietro Ferrara .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRIF, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

    Ahmed Bouajjani

  2. VERIMAG, CNRS & Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

    David Monniaux

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Ferrara, P., Tripp, O., Liu, P., Koskinen, E. (2017). Using Abstract Interpretation to Correct Synchronization Faults. In: Bouajjani, A., Monniaux, D. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10145. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52234-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52234-0_11

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52234-0

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