Detection of strong predicates in distributed programs

This paper discusses detection of unstable predicates in a distributed program. Some applications of this are in program debugging and testing. The authors provide a predicate logic in the form of a grammar giving the rewrite rules for constructing predicates about a distributed program. This predicate logic is general enough to describe many conditions programmers are interested in. These predicates may depend on the global state of the system and may be unstable in nature. However, the detection algorithms given guarantee to detect such predicates should one ever become true. The main results of this work are a logic for expressing unstable distributed predicates and detection methods for certain unstable distributed predicates