CIVL the concurrency intermediate verification language

• Published in: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Siegel, Stephen F., Zheng, Manchun, Luo, Ziqing, Zirkel, Timothy K., Marianiello, Andre V., Edenhofner, John G., Dwyer, Matthew B., Rogers, Michael S.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 15.11.2015
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Computing methodologies > Symbolic and algebraic manipulation; Concurrent computing; Government; Graphics processing units; Hardware > Hardware validation > Functional verification > Assertion checking; Libraries; Message systems; Model checking; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Formal software verification; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language types > Concurrent programming languages; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language types > Distributed programming languages; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language types > Parallel programming languages; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods > Model checking; Theory of computation > Logic > Verification by model checking; Theory of computation > Models of computation > Abstract machines; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Abstraction; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Assertions; CUDA; intermediate representation; model checking; OpenMP; MPI; symbolic execution; program transformation; pthreads; parallel programming; verification; concurrency
• ISBN: 1450337236; 9781450337236
• ISSN: 2167-4337
• DOI: 10.1145/2807591.2807635

There are many ways to express parallel programs: message-passing libraries (MPI) and multithreading/GPU language extensions such as OpenMP, Pthreads, and CUDA, are but a few. This multitude creates a serious challenge for developers of software verification tools: it takes enormous effort to develop such tools, but each development effort typically targets one small part of the concurrency landscape, with little sharing of techniques and code among efforts. To address this problem, we present CIVL: the Concurrency Intermediate Verification Language. CIVL provides a general concurrency model capable of representing programs in a variety of concurrency dialects, including those listed above. The CIVL framework currently includes front-ends for the four dialects, and a back-end verifier which uses model checking and symbolic execution to check a number of properties, including the absence of deadlocks, race conditions, assertion violations, illegal pointer dereferences and arithmetic, memory leaks, divisions by zero, and out-of-bound array indexing; it can also check that two programs are functionally equivalent.