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Complexity of analyzing the synchronization structure of concurrent programs

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Summary

Foundational to verification of some aspects of communicating concurrent systems is knowledge of the synchronization which may occur during execution. The synchronization determines the actions that may occur in parallel, may determine program data flow, and may also lead to inherently erroneous situations (e.g. deadlock). This paper formalizes the notion of the synchronization structure of concurrent programs that use the rendezvous (or similar) mechanism for achieving synchronization. The formalism is oriented towards supporting verification as performed by automated static program analysis. Complexity results are presented which indicate what may be expected in this area and which also shed light on the difficulty of correctly constructing concurrent systems. Specifically, most of the analysis tasks considered are shown to be intractable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, 92717, Irvine, CA, USA

    Richard N. Taylor

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  1. Richard N. Taylor
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This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant MCS 77-02194, the U.S. Army Research Office under grant DAAG 29-80-C-0094, and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under grants GR 29 and A 5538

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Taylor, R.N. Complexity of analyzing the synchronization structure of concurrent programs. Acta Informatica 19, 57–84 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00263928

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00263928

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