Techniques to tackle state explosion in global predicate detection

Abstract

Global predicate detection, which is an important problem in testing and debugging distributed programs, is very hard due to the combinatorial explosion of the global state space. The paper presents several techniques to tackle the state explosion problem in detecting whether an arbitrary predicate /spl Phi/ is true at some consistent global state of a distributed system. We present space efficient online algorithms for detecting /spl Phi/. We then improve the performance of our algorithms, both in space and time, by increasing the granularity of the execution step from an event to a sequence of events in each process.