A general approach to trace-checking in distributed computing systems

The problem of checking the correctness of distributed computations arises when debugging distributed algorithms, and more generally when testing protocols or distributed applications. For that purpose, one describes the expected behavior (or suspected errors) by a global property: for example, a predicate on process variables, or the set of admissible orderings on observable events. The problem is to check whether this property is satisfied or not during the execution. A relevant model for this study is the partial order of message causality and the associated state graph, called “lattice of consistent cuts”. In this paper, we propose a general approach to trace checking, based on partial order theory