Ankush Desai and Ethan Jackson and Amar Phanishayee and Shaz Qadeer and Sanjit A. Seshia

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2015-198

September 15, 2015

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-198.pdf

Fault-tolerant distributed systems are difficult to get right because they must deal with concurrency and failures. Despite decades of research, current approaches for a more rigorous way of building robust distributed systems are unsatisfactory. In this paper, we present P, a new approach that makes it easier to build, specify, and test distributed systems. Our programming framework provides two important features. First, we provide a high-level language for formally specifying implementations, abstractions, and specifications of protocols. The P compiler automatically generates efficient C code from the input program. Second, we provide a tool for compositional systematic testing of a P program. Together, these attributes have the power to generate and reproduce within minutes, executions that could take months or even years to manifest in a live distributed system.

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BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Desai:EECS-2015-198,
    Author= {Desai, Ankush and Jackson, Ethan and Phanishayee, Amar and Qadeer, Shaz and Seshia, Sanjit A.},
    Title= {Building Reliable Distributed Systems With P},
    Year= {2015},
    Month= {Sep},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-198.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2015-198},
    Abstract= {Fault-tolerant distributed systems
are difficult to get right because they must deal with concurrency and failures.
Despite decades of research, current
approaches for a more rigorous way of building robust
distributed systems are unsatisfactory.
In this paper, we present P, a new approach that makes it easier
to build, specify, and test distributed systems. 
Our programming framework provides two important features. 
First, we provide a high-level language for formally specifying implementations,
abstractions, and specifications of protocols.
The P compiler automatically generates efficient C code from
the input program.
Second, we provide a tool for compositional systematic testing of a
P program.
Together, these attributes have the power to generate and reproduce within minutes,
executions that could take months or even years to manifest in a live
distributed system.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Desai, Ankush 
%A Jackson, Ethan 
%A Phanishayee, Amar 
%A Qadeer, Shaz 
%A Seshia, Sanjit A. 
%T Building Reliable Distributed Systems With P
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2015
%8 September 15
%@ UCB/EECS-2015-198
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-198.html
%F Desai:EECS-2015-198