Design and Verification of Distributed Phasers

Abstract

A phaser is an expressive synchronization construct that unifies collective and point-to-point coordination with dynamic registration of parallel tasks. Each task can participate in a phaser as a signaler, a waiter, or both. The participants in a phaser may change over time as tasks are added and deleted. In this paper, we present a highly concurrent and scalable design of phasers for a distributed memory environment. Our design for a distributed phaser employs a pair of skip lists augmented with the ability to collect and propagate synchronization signals. To enable a high degree of concurrency, addition and deletion of participant tasks are performed in two phases: a “fast single-link-modify” step followed by multiple hand-over-hand “lazy multi-link-modify” steps. Verifying highly-concurrent protocols is difficult. We analyze our design for a distributed phaser using the SPIN model checker. A straight-forward approach to model checking a distributed phaser operation requires an infeasibly large state space. To address this issue, we employ a novel “message-based” model checking scheme to enable a non- approximate complete model checking of our phaser design. We guarantee the semantic properties of phaser operations by ensuring that a set of linear temporal logic formulae are valid during model checking. We also present complexity analysis of the cost of synchronization and structural operations.

Publication
In Proceedings of International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par)