Techniques to tackle state explosion in global predicate detection

Abstract

Detecting properties about a distributed program is an important problem in testing and debugging distributed programs. This problem is very hard due to the combinatorial explosion of the global state space. For a given execution, we consider the problem of detecting whether a predicate /spl Phi/ is true at some global state of the system. First, we present a space efficient algorithm for detecting /spl Phi/. Next, we present a parallel algorithm to reduce the time taken to detect /spl Phi/. We then improve the performance of our algorithms, both in space and time, by increasing the granularity of the execution step from an event to a sequence of events in a process.