Section: New Software and Platforms
DF4ABS
Deadlock Framework for ABS
Scientific Description
We have prototyped a framework for statically detecting deadlocks in a concurrent object-oriented language with asynchronous method calls and cooperative scheduling of method activations (the language is ABS, which has been developed in the EU project HATS and is currently extended with primitives for cloud-computing in the EU project ENVISAGE. ABS is very similar to ASP, developed by the former OASIS team.). Since this language features recursion and dynamic resource creation, deadlock detection is extremely complex and state-of-the-art solutions either give imprecise answers or do not scale. In order to augment precision and scalability we propose a modular framework that allows several techniques to be combined. The basic component of the framework is a front-end inference algorithm that extracts abstract behavioural descriptions of methods that retain resource dependency information. Then these behavioural descriptions are analyzed by a back-end that uses a fix-point technique to derive in a deterministic way the deadlock information.