Optimal Stateless Model Checking of Transactional Programs under Causal Consistency

TL;DR

This paper introduces TRANCHECKER, an optimal stateless model checking framework for concurrent programs under various causal consistency models, efficiently exploring traces to detect anomalies.

Contribution

It presents a provably optimal SMC algorithm for multiple causal consistency models and implements it in the TRANCHECKER tool.

Findings

TRANCHECKER effectively detects anomalies in distributed database benchmarks.

The algorithm explores each trace relation exactly once, ensuring efficiency.

Experimental results demonstrate good performance of TRANCHECKER.

Abstract

We present a framework for efficient stateless model checking (SMC) of concurrent programs under five prominent models of causal consistency, CCv,CM,CC, Read Committed and Read Atomic. Our approach is based on exploring traces under the program order (po) and the reads from (rf) relations. Our SMC algorithm is provably optimal in the sense that it explores each po and rf relation exactly once. We have implemented our framework in a tool called TRANCHECKER. Experiments show that TRANCHECKER performs well in detecting anamolies in classical distributed databases benchmarks.