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International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems

International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems

FMOODS 2012, FORTE 2012: Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems pp 219–234Cite as

TransDPOR: A Novel Dynamic Partial-Order Reduction Technique for Testing Actor Programs

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNPSE,volume 7273)

Abstract

To detect hard-to-find concurrency bugs, testing tools try to systematically explore all possible interleavings of the transitions in a concurrent program. Unfortunately, because of the nondeterminism in concurrent programs, exhaustively exploring all interleavings is time-consuming and often computationally intractable. Speeding up such tools requires pruning the state space explored. Partial-order reduction (POR) techniques can substantially prune the number of explored interleavings. These techniques require defining a dependency relation on transitions in the program, and exploit independency among certain transitions to prune the state space.

We observe that actor systems, a prevalent class of programs where computation entities communicate by exchanging messages, exhibit a dependency relation among co-enabled transitions with an interesting property: transitivity. This paper introduces a novel dynamic POR technique, TransDPOR, that exploits the transitivity of the dependency relation in actor systems. Empirical results show that leveraging transitivity speeds up exploration by up to two orders of magnitude compared to existing POR techniques.

Keywords

  • Model Check
  • Message Passing Interface
  • Dependency Relation
  • Transition Sequence
  • Execution Path

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Samira Tasharofi, Rajesh K. Karmani, Darko Marinov & Gul Agha

  2. Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, 21801, USA

    Steven Lauterburg

  3. INRIA, Campus de Beaulieu, France

    Axel Legay

Authors
  1. Samira Tasharofi
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  2. Rajesh K. Karmani
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  3. Steven Lauterburg
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  4. Axel Legay
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  5. Darko Marinov
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  6. Gul Agha
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Straße 2-3, 14482, Potsdam, Germany

    Holger Giese

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin, 61801, Urbana, IL, USA

    Grigore Rosu

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Tasharofi, S., Karmani, R.K., Lauterburg, S., Legay, A., Marinov, D., Agha, G. (2012). TransDPOR: A Novel Dynamic Partial-Order Reduction Technique for Testing Actor Programs. In: Giese, H., Rosu, G. (eds) Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems. FMOODS FORTE 2012 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7273. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30793-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30793-5_14

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