Decidability and Complexity for Quiescent Consistency

Quiescent consistency is a notion of correctness for a concurrent object that gives meaning to the object's behaviours in quiescent states, i.e., states in which none of the object's operations are being executed. The condition enables greater flexibility in object design by allowing more...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science pp. 116 - 125
Main Authors: Dongol, Brijesh, Hierons, Robert M.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 05.07.2016
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Verification
Information systems > Data management systems > Database management system engines
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development process management
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Formal software verification
Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Formal language definitions > Semantics
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods > Software verification
Theory of computation > Logic > Programming logic
Theory of computation > Models of computation > Concurrency
Theory of computation > Models of computation > Concurrency > Parallel computing models
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Program verification
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program semantics
Quiescent consistency
decidability
concurrent objects
Mazurkiewicz Trace Theory
ISBN:9781450343916, 1450343910
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Quiescent consistency is a notion of correctness for a concurrent object that gives meaning to the object's behaviours in quiescent states, i.e., states in which none of the object's operations are being executed. The condition enables greater flexibility in object design by allowing more behaviours to be admitted, which in turn allows the algorithms implementing quiescent consistent objects to be more efficient (when executed in a multithreaded environment). Quiescent consistency of an implementation object is defined in terms of a corresponding abstract specification. This gives rise to two important verification questions: membership (checking whether a behaviour of the implementation is allowed by the specification) and correctness (checking whether all behaviours of the implementation are allowed by the specification). In this paper, we consider the membership and correctness conditions for quiescent consistency, as well as a restricted form that assumes an upper limit on the number of events between two quiescent states. We show that the membership problem for unrestricted quiescent consistency is NP-complete and that the correctness problem is decidable, coNEXPTIME-hard, and in EXPSPACE. For the restricted form, we show that membership is in PTIME, while correctness is PSPACE-complete.
ISBN:9781450343916
1450343910
DOI:10.1145/2933575.2933576