Techniques to tackle state explosion in global predicate detection

Author

Alagar, Sridhar ; Venkatesan, Subbarayan

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Texas Univ., Dallas, TX, USA

Volume

27

Issue

8

fYear

2001

fDate

8/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

704

Lastpage

714

Abstract

Global predicate detection, which is an important problem in testing and debugging distributed programs, is very hard due to the combinatorial explosion of the global state space. The paper presents several techniques to tackle the state explosion problem in detecting whether an arbitrary predicate Φ is true at some consistent global state of a distributed system. We present space efficient online algorithms for detecting Φ. We then improve the performance of our algorithms, both in space and time, by increasing the granularity of the execution step from an event to a sequence of events in each process

Keywords

computational complexity; distributed programming; program debugging; program testing; arbitrary predicate; combinatorial explosion; consistent global state; debugging; distributed program testing; distributed system; execution step; global predicate detection; global state space; space efficient online algorithms; state explosion; Computer Society; Debugging; Explosions; Lattices; Message passing; Polynomials; Safety; State-space methods; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.940566

Filename

940566