Specification and Verification of Protocols for MPI Programs

We present an approach for the validation of Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs. The aim is to type-check programs against session-type based protocol specifications, enforcing properties such as protocol fidelity, absence of race conditions or deadlocks. We design and implement a protocol specification language based on dependent multiparty session types. The language is equipped with a type formation system and an operational semantics, and its correctness is ensured by a progress property for well formed types. For verification, the protocol is translated into the language of VCC, a software verifier for the C programming language. C+MPI programs are annotated with assertions that help the verifier either prove or disprove the conformance of programs against protocols. A large part of the necessary annotations are automatically introduced by an annotator we developed. We successfully validated several publicly available MPI programs with this approach.