Quasi-Optimal Partial Order Reduction

A dynamic partial order reduction (DPOR) algorithm is optimal when it always explores at most one representative per Mazurkiewicz trace. Existing literature suggests that the reduction obtained by the non-optimal, state-of-the-art Source-DPOR (SDPOR) algorithm is comparable to optimal DPOR. We show the first program with $$\mathop {\mathcal {O}} (n)$$ Mazurkiewicz traces where SDPOR explores $$\mathop {\mathcal {O}} (2^n)$$ redundant schedules (as this paper was under review, we were made aware of the recent publication of another paper [3] which contains an independently-discovered example program with the same characteristics). We furthermore identify the cause of this blow-up as an NP-hard problem. Our main contribution is a new approach, called Quasi-Optimal POR, that can arbitrarily approximate an optimal exploration using a provided constant k. We present an implementation of our method in a new tool called Dpu using specialised data structures. Experiments with Dpu, including Debian packages, show that optimality is achieved with low values of k, outperforming state-of-the-art tools.