On the completeness of verifying message passing programs under bounded asynchrony

Abstract

We address the problem of verifying message passing programs, defined as a set of processes communicating through unbounded FIFO buffers. We introduce a bounded analysis that explores a special type of computations, called k-synchronous. These computations can be viewed as (unbounded) sequences of interaction phases, each phase allowing at most k send actions (by different processes), followed by a sequence of receives corresponding to sends in the same phase. We give a procedure for deciding k-synchronizability of a program, i.e., whether every computation is equivalent (has the same happens-before relation) to one of its k-synchronous computations. We show that reachability over k-synchronous computations and checking k-synchronizability are both PSPACE-complete.