Characterization of a sequentially consistent memory and verification of a cache memory by abstraction

The contribution of the paper is two-fold. We give a set of properties expressible as temporal logic formulas such that any system satisfying them is a sequentially consistent memory, and which is sufficiently precise such that every reasonable concrete system that implements a sequentially consistent memory satisfies these properties. Then, we verify these properties on a distributed cache memory system by means of a verification method, based on the use of abstract interpretation which has been presented in previous papers and so far applied to finite state systems. The motivation for this paper was to show that it can also be successfully applied to systems with an infinite state space. This is a revised and extended version of [Gra94].