Verification of concurrent control flow in distributed computer systems

An approach to verifying control flow in distributed computer systems (DCS) is presented. The approach is based on control flow checking among software components distributed over processors and cooperating among them. In this approach, control-flow behavior of DCS software is modeled and contained in special software components called verifiers. The verifiers are distributed over the processors and consulted to check the correctness of the control flow in DCS software during its execution. Algorithms for deriving the verifiers are presented. This technique can detect global errors including synchronization errors as well as local errors. It can be used for sequential or concurrent software at various levels of details. Experiments show that using this technique requires no significant overhead.