Julien Tesson

Systematic Development of Correct Bulk Synchronous Parallel Programs

With the current generalisation of parallel architectures arises the concern of applying formal methods to parallelism. The complexity of parallel, compared to sequential, programs makes them more error-prone and difficult to verify. Bulk Synchronous Parallelism (BSP) is a model of computation which offers a high degree of abstraction like PRAM models but yet a realistic cost model based on a structured parallelism. We propose a framework for refining a sequential specification toward a functional BSP program, the whole process being done with the help of the Coq proof assistant. To do so we define BH, a new homomorphic skeleton, which captures the essence of BSP computation in an algorithmic level, and also serves as a bridge in mapping from high level specification to low level BSP parallel programs.

Program calculation in coq

Program calculation, being a programming technique that derives programs from specification by means of formula manipulation, is a challenging activity. It requires human insights and creativity, and needs systems to help human to focus on clever parts of the derivation by automating tedious ones and verifying correctness of transformations. Different from many existing systems, we show in this paper that Coq, a popular theorem prover, provides a cheap way to implement a powerful system to support program calculation, which has not been recognized so far. We design and implement a set of tactics for the Coq proof assistant to help the user to derive programs by program calculation and to write proofs in calculational form. The use of these tactics is demonstrated through program calculations in Coq based on the theory of lists.

A Verified Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML Heat Diffusion Simulation

Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML (BSML) is a structured parallel functional programming language. It extends a functional programming language of the ML family with a polymorphic data structure and a very small set of primitives. In this paper we describe a framework for reasoning about BSML programs using the Coq interactive theorem prover and for extracting actual parallel programs from proofs. This framework is illustrated through a simulation application based on heat equation.

Formal semantics of DRMA-style programming in BSPlib

BSPlib is a programming library for C and Fortran which supports bulk synchronous parallelism (BSP). This paper is about a formal semantics for the DRMA programming style of the BSPlib library. The aim is to study the behavior of BSPlib programs and to propose some syntactic characterizations used to provide guarantees on semantic properties. This work is the basis for future tools dedicated to the validation of BSPlib programs.

Calculating Parallel Programs in Coq Using List Homomorphisms

SyDPaCC is a set of libraries for the Coq proof assistant. It allows to write naive functional programs (i.e. with high complexity) that are considered as specifications, and to transform them into more efficient versions. These more efficient versions can then be automatically parallelised before being extracted from Coq into source code for the functional language OCaml together with calls to the Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML library. In this paper we present a new core version of SyDPaCC for the development of parallel programs correct-by-construction using the theory of list homomorphisms and algorithmic skeletons implemented and verified in Coq. The framework is illustrated on the maximum prefix sum problem.

Programming with BSP homomorphisms

Algorithmic skeletons in conjunction with list homomorphisms play an important role in formal development of parallel algorithms. We have designed a notion of homomorphism dedicated to bulk synchronous parallelism. In this paper we derive two application using this theory: sparse matrix vector multiplication and the all nearest smaller values problem. We implement a support for BSP homomorphism in the Orleans Skeleton Library and experiment it with these two applications.

A verified library of algorithmic skeletons on evenly distributed arrays

To make parallel programming as widespread as parallel architectures, more structured parallel programming paradigms are necessary. One of the possible approaches are algorithmic skeletons. They can be seen as higher order functions implemented in parallel. Algorithmic skeletons offer a simple interface to the programmer without all the details of parallel implementations as they abstract the communications and the synchronisations of parallel activities. To write a parallel program, users have to combine and compose the skeletons. Orleans Skeleton Library (OSL) is an efficient meta-programmed C++ library of algorithmic skeletons that manipulate distributed arrays. A prototype implementation of OSL exists as a library written with the function parallel language Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML (BSML). In this paper we are interested in verifying the correctness of a subset of this prototype implementation. To do so, we give a functional specification of a subset of OSL and we prove the correctness of the BSML implementation with respect to this functional specification, using the Coq proof assistant. To illustrate how the user could use these skeletons, we prove the correctness of two applications implemented with them.

A Verified Generate-Test-Aggregate Coq Library for Parallel Programs Extraction

The integration of the generate-and-test paradigm and semirings for the aggregation of results provides a parallel programming framework for large scale data-intensive applications. The so-called GTA framework allows a user to define an inefficient specification of his/her problem as a composition of a generator of all the candidate solutions, a tester of valid solutions, and an aggregator to combine the solutions. Through two calculation theorems a GTA specification is transformed into a divide-and-conquer efficient program that can be implemented in parallel. In this paper we present a verified implementation of this framework in the Coq proof assistant: efficient bulk synchronous parallel functional programs can be extracted from naive GTA specifications. We show how to apply this framework on an example, including performance experiments on parallel machines.

Formal derivation and extraction of a parallel program for the all nearest smaller values problem

The All Nearest Smaller Values (ANSV) problem is an important problem for parallel programming as it can be used to solve several problems and is one of the phases of several other parallel algorithms. We formally develop by construction a functional parallel program for solving the ANSV problem using the theory of Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) homomorphisms within the Coq proof assistant. The performances of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML program obtained from Coq is compared to a version derived without software support (pen-and-paper) and implemented using the Orléans Skeleton Library of algorithmic skeletons, and to a (unproved correct) direct implementation of the BSP algorithm of He and Huang.

Multi-ML: Programming Multi-BSP Algorithms in ML

Abstractbsp is a bridging model between abstract execution and concrete parallel systems. Structure and abstraction brought by bsp allow to have portable parallel programs with scalable performance predictions, without dealing with low-level details of architectures. In the past, we designed bsml for programming bsp algorithms in ml. However, the simplicity of the bsp model does not fit the complexity of today’s hierarchical architectures such as clusters of machines with multiple multi-core processors. The multi-bsp model is an extension of the bsp model which brings a tree-based view of nested components of hierarchical architectures. To program multi-bsp algorithms in ml, we propose the multi-ml language as an extension of bsml where a specific kind of recursion is used to go through a hierarchy of computing nodes. We define a formal semantics of the language and present preliminary experiments which show performance improvements with respect to bsml.