Reducing Concurrent Analysis Under a Context Bound to Sequential Analysis
Akash Lal and Thomas Reps
This paper addresses the analysis of concurrent programs with shared
memory. Such an analysis is undecidable in the presence of multiple
procedures. One approach used in recent work obtains
decidability by providing only a partial guarantee of
correctness: the approach bounds the number of context switches allowed
in the concurrent program, and aims to prove safety, or find bugs,
under the given bound. In this paper, we show how to obtain simple and
efficient algorithms for the analysis of concurrent programs with a
context bound. We give a general reduction from a concurrent program
P, and a given context bound K, to a sequential
program PsK such that the analysis
of PsK can be used to prove
properties about P. We give instances of the reduction for common
program models used in model checking, such as Boolean programs
and pushdown systems.
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University of Wisconsin