Options
2014
Conference Paper
Titel
Robustness against power is PSpace-complete
Abstract
Power is a RISC architecture developed by IBM, Freescale, and several other companies and implemented in a series of POWER processors. The architecture features a relaxed memory model providing very weak guarantees with respect to the ordering and atomicity of memory accesses. Due to these weaknesses, some programs that are correct under sequential consistency (SC) show undesirable effects when run under Power. We say that these programs are not robust against the Power memory model. Formally, a program is robust if every computation under Power has the same data and control dependencies as some SC computation. Our contribution is a decision procedure for robustness of concurrent programs against the Power memory model. It is based on three ideas. First, we reformulate robustness in terms of the acyclicity of a happens before relation. Second, we prove that among the computations with cyclic happens-before relation there is one in a certain normal form. Finally, we reduc e the existence of such a normal-form computation to a language emptiness problem. Altogether, this yields a PSpace algorithm for checking robustness against Power. We complement it by a matching lower bound to show PSpace-completeness.