Safely writing high-performance concurrent programs is notoriously difficult. To aid developers, we introduce Armada, a language and tool designed to formally verify such programs with relatively little effort. Via a C-like language and a small-step, state-machine-based semantics, Armadagives developers the flexibility to choose arbitrary memory layout and synchronization primitives so that they are never constrained in their pursuit of performance. To reduce developer effort, Armadaleverages SMT-powered automation and a library of powerful reasoning techniques, including rely-guarantee, TSO elimination, reduction, and pointer analysis. All of these techniques are proven sound, and Armadacan be soundly extended with additional strategies over time. Using Armada, we verify five concurrent case studies and show that we can achieve performance equivalent to that of unverified code.

Distributed systems are notoriously difficult to design and implement correctly. Formal verification provides correctness proofs, and has recently been successfully applied to various distributed systems. At the heart of a typical formal verification is a computer-checked proof with an inductive invariant. Finding this inductive invariant is the hardest part of the proof: a part that is currently undertaken manually by the developer and is responsible for most of the effort associated with formal verification.

Designing and implementing distributed systems correctly is a very challenging task. Recently, formal verification has been successfully used to prove the correctness of distributed systems. At the heart of formal verification lies a computer-checked proof with an inductive invariant. Finding this inductive invariant, however, is the most difficult part of the proof. Alas, current proof techniques require inductive invariants to be found manually---and painstakingly---by the developer.