
Departmental Papers (CIS)
Date of this Version
7-2012
Document Type
Conference Paper
Recommended Citation
Sela Mador-Haim, Luc Maranget, Susmit Sarkar, Kayvan Memarian, Jade Alglave, Scott Owens, Rajeev Alur, Milo Martin, Peter Sewell, and Derek Williams, "An Axiomatic Memory Model for POWER Multiprocessors", Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Computer Aided Verification 7358, 495-512. July 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31424-7_36
Abstract
The growing complexity of hardware optimizations employed by multiprocessors leads to subtle distinctions among allowed and disallowed behaviors, posing challenges in specifying their memory models formally and accurately, and in understanding and analyzing the behavior of concurrent software. This complexity is particularly evident in the IBM® Power Architecture® , for which a faithful specification was published only in 2011 using an operational style. In this paper we present an equivalent axiomatic specification, which is more abstract and concise. Although not officially sanctioned by the vendor, our results indicate that this axiomatic specification provides a reasonable basis for reasoning about current IBM® POWER® multiprocessors.We establish the equivalence of the axiomatic and operational specifications using both manual proof and extensive testing. To demonstrate that the constraint-based style of axiomatic specification is more amenable to computer-aided verification, we develop a SAT-based tool for evaluating possible outcomes of multi-threaded test programs, and we show that this tool is significantly more efficient than a tool based on an operational specification.
Subject Area
CPS Formal Methods
Publication Source
Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Computer Aided Verification
Volume
7358
Start Page
495
Last Page
512
DOI
10.1007/978-3-642-31424-7_36
Copyright/Permission Statement
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com
Date Posted: 17 July 2012
Comments
From the 24th International Conference, CAV 2012, Berkeley, CA, USA, July 7-13, 2012.