Marc Shapiro
Joint work with Viktor Vafeiadis, Maurice Herlihy, Tony Hoare,

INRIA and LIP6 –

Abstract:

Reasoning about fine-grain concurrent programs is extremely difficult because threads can interfere with one another in arbitrary ways. We propose to use the ‘rely-guarantee’ approach. In addition to the standard pre-condition and post-condition of sequential reasoning, a program is equipped with additional assertions: a rely condition that describes how much interference it it willing to suffer from the environment, and a guarantee condition that limits how much interference it will inflict to its environment. If one thread’s rely condition is implied by all other threads’ guarantee conditions (and if certain technical conditions are met), then standard sequential reasoning can be used to prove the post-condition. We describe our extensions to the basic rely-guarantee approach to make it practical, and show how we can prove a family of fine-grained concurrent list algorithms. Ultimately, we hope to incorporate the techniques into a compiler.



Bio: Marc Shapiro hasbeen doing research in distributed systems since his PhD in 1980. He invented the proxy concept, built an early object-oriented distributed system, and worked on distributed garbage collection and persistence. He recently spent 6 1/2 years at Microsoft Research in Cambridge before returning to INRIA. His current research is a theory of replication and consistency, the Action-Constraint Framework. He is also a founder and chair of the European chapter of ACM SIGOPS, EuroSys http://www.eurosys.org/. He like cats and ski mountaineering.

 

Date: 2005-Jul-13     Time: 16:00:00     Room: 336

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