Abstract
This chapter discusses efficient detection of global predicates in a distributed program. Previous work in detection of global predicates was restricted to predicates that could be specified as a boolean formula of local predicates. Many properties in distributed systems, however, use the state of channels. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of a channel predicate and provide an efficient algorithm to detect any boolean formula of local and channel predicates. We define a property called monotonicity for channel predicates. Monotonicity is crucial for efficient detection of global predicates. We show that many problems studied earlier, such as detection of termination and computation of global virtual time are special cases of the problem considered in this chapter. The message complexity of our algorithm is bounded by the number of messages used by the program. The main application of our results are in debugging and testing of distributed programs. Our algorithms have been incorporated in a distributed programming environment which runs on a network of IBM RS/6000 Workstations under AIX with the PVM environment.
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Supported in part by the NSF Grant CCR-9110605, a TRW faculty assistantship award, a General Motors Fellowship, and an IBM grant
Supported in part by the Texas Instruments/Jack Kilby Faculty Fellowship
Supported in part by an MCD fellowship
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Garg, V., Chase, C., Mitchell, R., Kilgore, R. (1996). Efficient Detection of Unstable Global Conditions Based on Monotonic Channel Predicates. In: Zaky, A., Lewis, T. (eds) Tools and Environments for Parallel and Distributed Systems. The Springer International Series in Software Engineering, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4123-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4123-3_10
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