Liveness-Preserving Atomicity Abstraction

-Preserving Atomicity Abstraction Alexey Gotsman1 and Hongseok Yang2 1 IMDEA Software Institute 2 University of Oxford Modern concurrent algorithms are usually encapsulated in libraries, and complex algorithms are often constructed using libraries of simpler ones. We present the first theorem that allows harnessing this structure to give compositional liveness proofs to concurrent algorithms and their clients. We show that, while proving a liveness property of a client using a concurrent library, we can soundly replace the library by another one related to the original library by a generalisation of a well-known notion of linearizability. We apply this result to show formally that lock-freedom, an often-used liveness property of non-blocking algorithms, is compositional for linearizable libraries, and provide an example illustrating our proof technique.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICALP
• Authors: Alexey Gotsman, Hongseok Yang
• Keywords: Concurrent Algorithms, ICALP 2011, Programming Languages, Proof Technique, Software Institute