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Model checking of linearizability of concurrent list implementations
Get PDFConcurrent data structures with fine-grained synchronization are notoriously difficult to implement correctly. The difficulty of reasoning about these implementations does not stem from the number of variables or the program size, but rather from the large number of possible interleavings. These implementations are therefore prime candidates for model checking. We introduce an algorithm for verifying linearizability of singly-linked heap-based concurrent data structures. We consider a model consisting of an unbounded heap where each node consists an element from an unbounded data domain, with a restricted set of operations for testing and updating pointers and data elements. Our main result is that linearizability is decidable for programs that invoke a fixed number of methods, possibly in parallel. This decidable fragment covers many of the common implementation techniques — fine-grained locking, lazy synchronization, and lock-free synchronization. We also show how the technique can be used to verify optimistic implementations with the help of programmer annotations. We developed a verification tool CoLT and evaluated it on a representative sample of Java implementations of the concurrent set data structure. The tool verified linearizability of a number of implementations, found a known error in a lock-free imple- mentation and proved that the corrected version is linearizable
Robustness of sequential circuits
Get PDFDigital components play a central role in the design of complex embedded systems. These components are interconnected with other, possibly analog, devices and the physical environment. This environment cannot be entirely captured and can provide inaccurate input data to the component. It is thus important for digital components to have a robust behavior, i.e. the presence of a small change in the input sequences should not result in a drastic change in the output sequences.
In this paper, we study a notion of robustness for sequential circuits. However, since sequential circuits may have parts that are naturally discontinuous (e.g., digital controllers with switching behavior), we need a flexible framework that accommodates this fact and leaves discontinuous parts of the circuit out from the robustness analysis. As a consequence, we consider sequential circuits that have their input variables partitioned into two disjoint sets: control and disturbance variables. Our contributions are (1) a definition of robustness for sequential circuits as a form of continuity with respect to disturbance variables, (2) the characterization of the exact class of sequential circuits that are robust according to our definition, (3) an algorithm to decide whether a sequential circuit is robust or not
Transactions in the jungle
Get PDFTransactional memory (TM) has shown potential to simplify the task of writing concurrent programs. Inspired by classical work on databases, formal definitions of the semantics of TM executions have been proposed. Many of these definitions assumed that ac- cesses to shared data are solely performed through transactions. In practice, due to legacy code and concurrency libraries, transactions in a TM have to share data with non-transactional operations. The semantics of such interaction, while widely discussed by practitioners, lacks a clear formal specification. Those interactions can vary, sometimes in subtle ways, between TM implementations and underlying memory models.
We propose a correctness condition for TMs, parametrized opacity, to formally capture the now folklore notion of strong atomicity by stipulating the two following intuitive requirements: first, every transaction appears as if it is executed instantaneously with respect to other transactions and non-transactional operations, and second, non-transactional operations conform to the given underlying memory model. We investigate the inherent cost of implementing parametrized opacity. We first prove that parametrized opacity requires either instrumenting non-transactional operations (for most memory models) or writing to memory by transactions using potentially expensive read-modify-write instructions (such as compare-and-swap). Then, we show that for a class of practical relaxed memory models, parametrized opacity can indeed be im- plemented with constant-time instrumentation of non-transactional writes and no instrumentation of non-transactional reads. We show that, in practice, parametrizing the notion of correctness allows de- veloping more efficient TM implementations
Strategy logic
Get PDFWe introduce strategy logic, a logic that treats strategies in two-player games as explicit first-order objects. The explicit treatment of strategies allows us to specify properties of nonzero-sum games in a simple and natural way. We show that the one-alternation fragment of strategy logic is strong enough to express the existence of Nash equilibria and secure equilibria, and subsumes other logics that were introduced to reason about games, such as ATL, ATL*, and game logic. We show that strategy logic is decidable, by constructing tree automata that recognize sets of strategies. While for the general logic, our decision procedure is nonelementary, for the simple fragment that is used above we show that the complexity is polynomial in the size of the game graph and optimal in the size of the formula (ranging from polynomial to 2EXPTIME depending on the form of the formula)
Quantitative languages
Get PDFQuantitative generalizations of classical languages, which assign to each word a real number instead of a Boolean value, have applications in modeling resource-constrained computation. We use weighted automata (finite automata with transition weights) to define several natural classes of quantitative languages over finite and infinite words; in particular, the real value of an infinite run is computed as the maximum, limsup, liminf, limit average, or discounted sum of the transition weights. We define the classical decision problems of automata theory (emptiness, universality, language inclusion, and language equivalence) in the quantitative setting and study their computational complexity. As the decidability of the language-inclusion problem remains open for some classes of weighted automata, we introduce a notion of quantitative simulation that is decidable and implies language inclusion. We also give a complete characterization of the expressive power of the various classes of weighted automata. In particular, we show that most classes of weighted automata cannot be determinized
Lumpability abstractions of rule-based systems
Get PDFThe induction of a signaling pathway is characterized by transient complex formation and mutual posttranslational modification of proteins. To faithfully capture this combinatorial process in a math- ematical model is an important challenge in systems biology. Exploiting the limited context on which most binding and modification events are conditioned, attempts have been made to reduce the com- binatorial complexity by quotienting the reachable set of molecular species, into species aggregates while preserving the deterministic semantics of the thermodynamic limit. Recently we proposed a quotienting that also preserves the stochastic semantics and that is complete in the sense that the semantics of individual species can be recovered from the aggregate semantics. In this paper we prove that this quotienting yields a sufficient condition for weak lumpability and that it gives rise to a backward Markov bisimulation between the original and aggregated transition system. We illustrate the framework on a case study of the EGF/insulin receptor crosstalk
Ist Bibliothek 2.0 überhaupt noch relevant? - Eine Einleitung
Get PDFMit diesem Buch möchten wir einen Überblick der aktuellen Diskussion zum Thema Bibliothek 2.0 geben und den Stand der tatsächlichen Umsetzung der Web 2.0-Ansätze in deutschsprachigen Bibliotheken beleuchten. An dieser Stelle ist die Frage erlaubt, warum es zu einer Zeit, in der es bereits die ersten "Web 3.0"- Konferenzen gibt, eines Handbuches der Bibliothek 2.0 noch bedarf. Und warum es überhaupt ein deutschsprachiges Handbuch zur Bibliothek 2.0 braucht, wo es doch bereits verschiedenste Publikationen zu diesem Thema aus anderen Ländern, insbesondere des angloamerikanischen Raums gibt. Ist dazu nicht bereits alles gesagt
Expressiveness and closure properties for quantitative languages
Get PDFWeighted automata are nondeterministic automata with numerical weights on transitions. They can define quantitative languages L that assign to each word w a real number L(w). In the case of infinite words, the value of a run is naturally computed as the maximum, limsup, liminf, limit-average, or discounted-sum of the transition weights. The value of a word w is the supremum of the values of the runs over w. We study expressiveness and closure questions about these quantitative languages. We first show that the set of words with value greater than a threshold can be omega-regular for deterministic limit-average and discounted-sum automata, while this set is always omega-regular when the threshold is isolated (i.e., some neighborhood around the threshold contains no word). In the latter case, we prove that the omega-regular language is robust against small perturbations of the transition weights. We next consider automata with transition weights 0 or 1 and show that they are as expressive as general weighted automata in the limit-average case, but not in the discounted-sum case. Third, for quantitative languages L-1 and L-2, we consider the operations max(L-1, L-2), min(L-1, L-2), and 1 - L-1, which generalize the boolean operations on languages, as well as the sum L-1 + L-2. We establish the closure properties of all classes of quantitative languages with respect to these four operations
Genetic linkage and natural selection
Get PDFThe prevalence of recombination in eukaryotes poses one of the most puzzling questions in biology. The most compelling general explanation is that recombination facilitates selection by breaking down the negative associations generated by random drift (i.e. Hill-Robertson interference, HRI). I classify the effects of HRI owing to: deleterious mutation, balancing selection and selective sweeps on: neutral diversity, rates of adaptation and the mutation load. These effects are mediated primarily by the density of deleterious mutations and of selective sweeps. Sequence polymorphism and divergence suggest that these rates may be high enough to cause significant interference even in genomic regions of high recombination. However, neither seems able to generate enough variance in fitness to select strongly for high rates of recombination. It is plausible that spatial and temporal fluctuations in selection generate much more fitness variance, and hence selection for recombination, than can be explained by uniformly deleterious mutations or species-wide selective sweeps
The stability of the apparent contour of an orientable 2-manifold
No full textThe (apparent) contour of a smooth mapping from a 2-manifold to the plane, f: M → R2 , is the set of critical values, that is, the image of the points at which the gradients of the two component functions are linearly dependent. Assuming M is compact and orientable and measuring difference with the erosion distance, we prove that the contour is stable