On the Complexity of Bounded Context Switching [article]

Peter Chini, Jonathan Kolberg, Andreas Krebs, Roland Meyer, Prakash Saivasan
2017 arXiv   pre-print
Bounded context switching (BCS) is an under-approximate method for finding violations to safety properties in shared memory concurrent programs. Technically, BCS is a reachability problem that is known to be NP-complete. Our contribution is a parameterized analysis of BCS. The first result is an algorithm that solves BCS when parameterized by the number of context switches (cs) and the size of the memory (m) in O*(m^(cs)2^(cs)). This is achieved by creating instances of the easier problem Shuff
more » ... which we solve via fast subset convolution. We also present a lower bound for BCS of the form m^o(cs / log(cs)), based on the exponential time hypothesis. Interestingly, closing the gap means settling a conjecture that has been open since FOCS'07. Further, we prove that BCS admits no polynomial kernel. Next, we introduce a measure, called scheduling dimension, that captures the complexity of schedules. We study BCS parameterized by the scheduling dimension (sdim) and show that it can be solved in O*((2m)^(4sdim)4^t), where t is the number of threads. We consider variants of the problem for which we obtain (matching) upper and lower bounds.
arXiv:1609.09728v2 fatcat:tdamef5gczegxilnaealmrcnmm