Efficient verification of halting properties for MPI programs with wildcard receives

Abstract

We are concerned with the verification of certain properties, such as freedom from deadlock, for parallel programs that are written using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). It is known that for MPI programs containing no "wildcard receives" (and restricted to a certain subset of MPI) freedom from deadlock can be established by considering only synchronous executions. We generalize this by presenting a model checking algorithm that deals with wildcard receives by moving back and forth between a synchronous and a buffering mode as the search of the state space progresses. This approach is similar to that taken by partial order reduction (POR) methods, but can dramatically reduce the number of states explored even when the standard POR techniques do not apply. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.