Verifying Programs That Use Causally-Ordered Message-Passing

Abstract

We give an operational model of causally-ordered message-passing primitives. Based on this model, we formulate a Hoare-style proof system for causally-ordered delivery. To illustrate the use of this proof system and to demonstrate the feasibility of applying invariant-based verification techniques to algorithms that depend on causally-ordered delivery, we verify an asynchronous variant of the distributed termination detection algorithm of Dijkstra, Feijen, and van Gasteren.