Formal Analysis of Message Passing

The message passing paradigm underlies many important families of programs—for instance programs in the area of high performance computing that support science and engineering research. Unfortunately, very few formal methods researchers are involved in developing formal analysis tools and techniques for message passing programs. This paper summarizes research being done in our groups in support of this area, specifically with respect to the Message Passing Interface. We emphasize the need for specialized varieties of many familiar notions such as deadlock detection, race analysis, symmetry analysis, partial order reduction, static analysis and symbolic reasoning support. Since these issues are harbingers of those being faced in multicore programming, the time is ripe to build a critical mass of researchers working in this area.