POPL 2017
Sun 15 - Sat 21 January 2017
Fri 20 Jan 2017 14:45 - 15:10 at Amphitheater 44 - Concurrency 3 Chair(s): Adam Chlipala

Distributed algorithms have many mission-critical applications ranging from embedded systems and replicated databases to cloud computing. Due to asynchronous communication, process faults, or network failures, these algorithms are difficult to design and verify. Many algorithms achieve fault tolerance by using threshold guards that, for instance, ensure that a process waits until it has received an acknowledgment from a majority of its peers. Consequently, domain-specific languages for fault-tolerant distributed systems offer language support for threshold guards.

We introduce an automated method for model checking of safety and liveness of threshold-guarded distributed algorithms in systems where the number of processes and the fraction of faulty processes are parameters. Our method is based on a short counterexample property: if a distributed algorithm violates a temporal specification, then there is a counterexample whose length is bounded and independent of the parameters. We prove this property by (i) characterizing executions depending on the structure of the temporal formula, and (ii) using commutativity of transitions to accelerate and shorten executions. We extended the ByMC toolset (Byzantine Model Checker) with our technique, and verified liveness and safety of 10 prominent fault-tolerant distributed algorithms, most of which were out of reach for existing techniques.

Fri 20 Jan

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

14:20 - 16:00
Concurrency 3POPL at Amphitheater 44
Chair(s): Adam Chlipala MIT
14:20
25m
Talk
Parallel Functional Arrays
POPL
Ananya Kumar , Guy E. Blelloch Carnegie Mellon University, Robert Harper
14:45
25m
Talk
A Short Counterexample Property for Safety and Liveness Verification of Fault-tolerant Distributed Algorithms
POPL
Igor Konnov TU Wien, Marijana Lazić TU Wien, Helmut Veith TU Wien, Josef Widder TU Wien
DOI Pre-print
15:10
25m
Talk
Analyzing divergence in bisimulation semantics
POPL
Xinxin Liu Institute of software, Chinese academy of sciences, Tingting Yu , Wenhui Zhang Institute of software, Chinese academy of sciences
15:35
25m
Talk
Fencing off Go: Liveness and Safety for Channel-Based Programming
POPL
Julien Lange Imperial College London, Nicholas Ng Imperial College London, Bernardo Toninho Imperial College London, Nobuko Yoshida Imperial College London, UK
Pre-print