A Novel Approach to Efficiently Verify Sequential Consistency in Concurrent Programs

Verifying sequential consistency (SC) in concurrent programs is computationally challenging due to the exponential growth of possible interleavings among read and write operations. Many of these interleavings produce identical outcomes, rendering exhaustive verification approaches inefficient and computationally expensive, especially as thread counts increase. To mitigate this challenge, this study introduces a novel approach that efficiently verifies SC by identifying a minimal subset of valid event orderings. The proposed method iteratively focuses on ordering write events and evaluates their compatibility with SC conditions, including program order, read-from (rf) relations, and SC semantics, thereby significantly reducing redundant computations. Corresponding read events are subsequently integrated according to program order once the validity of write events has been confirmed, enabling rapid identification of violations to SC criteria. Three algorithmic variants of this approach were developed and empirically evaluated. The final variant exhibited superior performance, achieving substantial improvements in execution time—ranging from 31.919% to 99.992%—compared to the optimal existing practical SC verification algorithms. Additionally, comparative experiments demonstrated that the proposed approach consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and scalability.