TransDPOR: A novel dynamic partial-order reduction technique for testing actor programs

Samira Tasharofi, Rajesh K. Karmani, Steven Lauterburg, Axel Legay, Darko Marinov, Gul Agha

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationFormal Techniques for Distributed Systems - Joint 14th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, FMOODS 2012 and 32nd IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, FORTE 2012, Proceedings
Pages219-234
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event14th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems, FMOODS 2012 and the 32nd IFIP International Conference on Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems, FORTE 2012 - Stockholm, Sweden
Duration: Jun 13 2012Jun 16 2012

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7273 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other14th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems, FMOODS 2012 and the 32nd IFIP International Conference on Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems, FORTE 2012
Country/TerritorySweden
CityStockholm
Period6/13/126/16/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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