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Abstract:

A new approach is presented for detecting whether a particular computation of an asynchronous distributed system satisfies Poss \Phi (read "possibly \Phi"), meaning the system could have passed through a global state satisfying predicate \Phi, or Def \Phi (read "definitely \Phi"), meaning the system definitely passed through a global state satisfying \Phi. Detection can be done easily by straightforward state-space search; this is essentially what Cooper and Marzullo proposed. We show that the persistent-set technique, a well-known partial-order method for optimizing state-space search, provides efficient detection. The resulting detection algorithms handle larger classes of predicates and thus are more general than two special-purpose detection algorithms by Garg and Waldecker, which detect Poss \Phi and Def \Phi efficiently for a restricted but important class of predicates. Furthermore, our algorithm for Poss \Phi achieves the same worst-case asymptotic time complexity as Garg and Waldecker's special-purpose algorithm for Poss \Phi. We apply our algorithm for Poss \Phi to two examples, achieving a speedup of over 700 in one example and over 70 in the other, compared to unoptimized state-space search. 1

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