Section: New Results

A verified compiler for relaxed-memory concurrency

Participant : Francesco Zappa Nardelli.

We studied the semantic design and verified compilation of a C-like programming language for concurrent shared-memory computation above x86 multiprocessors. The design of such a language is made surprisingly subtle by several factors: the relaxed-memory behaviour of the hardware, the effects of compiler optimisation on concurrent code, the need to support high-performance concurrent algorithms, and the desire for a reasonably simple programming model. In turn, this complexity makes verified (or verifying) compilation both essential and challenging. This project started in 2010. In 2013 an article, describing the correctness proof of all the phases of our CompCertTSO compiler (including experimental fence eliminations), appeared in the Journal of the ACM [7] .

In collaboration with Jaroslav Sevcik (U. Cambridge), Viktor Vafeiadis (MPI-SWS), Suresh Jagannathan (Purdue U.), Peter Sewell (U. Cambridge).