A Lattice-structured Proof Technique Applied to a Minimum Spanning Tree Algorithm
Name
MIT-LCS-TM-361.pdf
Size
62.37 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e1534abc8bb16a598efc4acadd5d3c06
Author(s)
Welch, Jennifer Lundelius
Lamport, Leslie
Lynch, Nancy A.
Date Issued
June 1988
Series/Report no.
MIT-LCS-TM-361
Abstract
Higly-optimized concurrent algorithms are often hard to prove correct because they have no natural decomposition into separately provable parts. This paper presents a proof technique for the modular verification of such non-modular algorithms. It generalizes existing verification techniques based on a totally-ordered hierarchy of refinements to allow a partially-ordered hierarchy - that is, a lattice of different views of the algorithm. The technique is applied to the well-known distributed minimum spanning tree algorithm of Gallager, Humblet, and Spira, which has until recently lacked a rigorous proof.
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