{"id":162941,"date":"2012-09-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/finding-non-terminating-executions-in-distributed-asynchronous-programs\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T21:13:45","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T04:13:45","slug":"finding-non-terminating-executions-in-distributed-asynchronous-programs","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/finding-non-terminating-executions-in-distributed-asynchronous-programs\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Non-Terminating Executions in Distributed Asynchronous Programs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Programming distributed and reactive asynchronous systems is complex due to the lack of synchronization between concurrently executing tasks, and arbitrary delay of message-based communication. As even simple programming mistakes have the capability to introduce divergent behavior, a key liveness property is eventual quiescence: for any finite number of external stimuli (e.g., client-generated events), only a finite number of internal messages are ever created.
\nIn this work we propose a practical three-step reduction-based approach for detecting divergent executions in asynchronous programs. As a first step, we give a code-to-code translation reducing divergence of an asynchronous program P to completed state-reachability, i.e., reachability to a given state with no pending synchronous tasks, of a polynomially-sized asynchronous program P’. In the second step, we give a code-to-code translation under-approximating completed state-reachability of P’ by state-reachability of a polynomially-sized recursive sequential program P\u201d(K), for the given analysis parameter K. Following Emmi et al. [8]’s delay-bounding approach, P\u201d(K) encodes a subset of P’, and thus of P, by limiting scheduling nondeterminism. As K is increased, more possibly divergent behaviors of P are considered, and in the limit as K approaches infinity, our reduction is complete for programs with finite data domains. As the final step we give the resulting state-reachability query to an of-the-shelf SMT-based sequential program verification tool.
\nWe demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype analysis tool called Alive, which detects divergent executions in several hand-coded variations of textbook distributed algorithms. As far as we are aware, our easy-to-implement prototype is the first tool which automatically detects divergence for distributed and reactive synchronous programs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Programming distributed and reactive asynchronous systems is complex due to the lack of synchronization between concurrently executing tasks, and arbitrary delay of message-based communication. As even simple programming mistakes have the capability to introduce divergent behavior, a key liveness property is eventual quiescence: for any finite number of external stimuli (e.g., client-generated events), only a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13560],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-162941","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"Static Analysis Symposium (SAS)","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2012-09-01","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"263037","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","title":"conf-sas-EmmiL12","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/conf-sas-EmmiL12.pdf","id":263037,"label_id":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Michael Emmi","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"akashl","user_id":30905,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=akashl"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[171153],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":171153,"post_title":"Corral Program Verifier","post_name":"q-program-verifier","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2013-05-19 09:16:29","post_modified":"2020-10-04 23:48:07","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/q-program-verifier\/","post_excerpt":"Corral is a\u00a0whole-program analysis tool for Boogie programs. 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