ISP ("In-situ Partial Order") is a tool for the formal verification of MPI programs developed within the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Like model checkers, such as SPIN, ISP verifies the complete state space of a system for a set of safety properties. However, unlike model checkers, ISP performs code level verification. This means that the tool verifies all relevant interleavings of a concurrent program by replaying the actual program code without building verification models. This idea was pioneered in a number of tools, notably by Godefroid, in his VeriSoft tool. Other recent tools of this genre include the Java Pathfinder, Microsoft's CHESS tool, and MODIST. Relevant interleavings are computed using a customized dynamic partial order reduction algorithm called POE.
ISP has been used to successfully verify up to 14,000 lines of MPI/C code for deadlocks and assertion violations. It currently supports over 60 MPI 2.1 functions, and has been tested with MPICH2, OpenMPI, and Microsoft MPI libraries.
ISP is available for download for linux and Mac OS X; as a Visual Studio plugin for running under Windows, and as an Eclipse plugin..
References
- Patrice Godefroid, Model Checking for Programming Languages using VeriSoft POPL 1997
- Cormac Flanagan and Patrice Godefroid, Dynamic partial-order reduction for model checking software,, POPL 2005, pp. 110-121, ACM, ISBN 1-58113-830-X
- Sarvani Vakkalanka, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, and Robert M. Kirby, Dynamic Verification of MPI Programs with Reductions in Presence of Split Operations and Relaxed Orderings, Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2008), pp. 66-79, LNCS 5123.
Anh Vo, Sarvani Vakkalanka, Michael DeLisi, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Robert M. Kirby, and Rajeev Thakur, Formal Verification of Practical MPI Programs, PPoPP 2009
Sarvani Vakkalanka, Michael DeLisi, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, and Robert M. Kirby, Scheduling Considerations for Building Dynamic Verification Tools for MPI, Parallel and Distributed Systems - Testing and Debugging (PADTAD-VI) Archived 2008-09-30 at the Wayback Machine, Seattle, WA, July, 2008.
Sarvani Vakkalanka, Michael DeLisi, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Robert M. Kirby, Rajeev Thakur, and William Gropp, Implementing Efficient Dynamic Formal Verification Methods for MPI Programs, Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface (EuroPVM/MPI 2008), Dublin, Ireland, 2008, LNCS 5205, pp. 248–256.
Sarvani Vakkalanka, Subodh Sharma, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, and Robert M. Kirby, ISP: A Tool for Model Checking MPI Programs, Principles and Practices of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2008) Archived 2009-02-08 at the Wayback Machine, Salt Lake City, February 2008, pp. 285–286.
Salman Pervez, Robert Palmer, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Robert M. Kirby, Rajeev Thakur, and William Gropp, Practical Model Checking Methods for Verifying Correctness of MPI Programs, Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface (PDF) Archived 2008-04-18 at the Wayback Machine (EuroPVM/MPI), Paris, 344—353, LNCS 4757, France, September 30 - October 3, 2007
Cited By
Combining symbolic execution with model checking to verify parallel numerical programs, umass.edu PDF SF Siegel, A Mironova, GS Avrunin, LA Clarke - ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology - portal.acm.org
Verification of halting properties for MPI programs using nonblocking operations
- psu.edu PDF
SF Siegel, GS Avrunin - Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007 - Springer
MPIWiz: Subgroup reproducible replay of MPI applications R Xue, X Liu, M Wu, Z Guo, W Chen, W Zheng, Z Zhang, Geoffrey M. Voelker Tsinghua University, Microsoft Research Asia, University of Southern California San Diego - cs.ucsd.edu
Dynamic testing of flow graph based parallel applications
- epfl.ch Archived 2016-06-10 at the Wayback Machine
B Schaeli, RD Hersch - Proceedings of the 6th workshop on Parallel and distributed Programming, 2008 - portal.acm.org
Visual Debugging of MPI Applications
- epfl.ch PDF
B Schaeli, A Al-Shabibi, RD Hersch - Proceedings of the 15th European PVM/MPI Users' Group …, 2008 - Springer