Abstract
We introduce the notion of collective assertions for message-passing-based parallel programs with distributed memory, such as those written using the Message Passing Interface. A single collective assertion comprises a set of locations in each process and an expression on the global state. The semantics are defined as follows: whenever control in a process reaches one of the locations, a “snapshot”of the local state of that process is sent to a coordinator; once a snapshot has been received from each process, the expression is evaluated on the global state formed by uniting the snapshots. We have extended the Toolkit for Accurate Scientific Software (TASS), a verifier based on symbolic execution and explicit state enumeration, to check that collective assertions hold on all possible executions of a C/MPI program. We give several examples of such programs, show that many properties of them are naturally expressed as collective assertions, and use TASS to verify or refute these.
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Siegel, S.F., Zirkel, T.K. (2011). Collective Assertions. In: Jhala, R., Schmidt, D. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6538. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_27
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