Boosting Sequential Consistency Checking Using Saturation

We address the problem of checking that an execution of a shared memory concurrent program is sequentially consistent (SC). This problem is NP-hard due to the necessity of finding a total order between the write operations that induces an acyclic happen-before relation. We propose an approach allowing to avoid falling systematically in the worst case, and to check SCness in polynomial-time in most cases in practice. The approach is based on a simple yet powerful saturation-based procedure for computing write constraints that must hold for SCness, allowing on one hand fast detection of SC violations, and on the other hand reducing drastically the search space for a total order witnessing SCness.