Building Reliable Distributed Systems With P
Ankush Desai, Ethan K. Jackson, Amar Phanishayee, Shaz Qadeer, Sanjit A. Seshia · UC Berkeley · 2015
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.