Weak-memory models are standard formal specifications of concurrency across hardware, programming languages, and distributed systems. A fundamental computational problem is consistency testing : is the observed execution of a concurrent program in alignment with the specification of the underlying system? The problem has been studied extensively across Sequential Consistency (SC) and weak memory, and proven to be N P -complete when some aspect of the input (e.g., number of threads/memory locations) is unbounded. This unboundedness has left a natural question open: are there efficient parameterized algorithms for testing? The main contribution of this paper is a deep hardness result for consistency testing under many popular weak-memory models: the problem remains N P -complete even in its bounded setting, where candidate executions contain a bounded number of threads, memory locations, and values. This hardness spreads across several Release-Acquire variants of C11, a popular variant of its Relaxed fragment, popular Causal Consistency models, and the POWER architecture. To our knowledge, this is the first result that fully exposes the hardness of weak-memory testing and proves that the problem admits no parameterization under standard input parameters. It also yields a computational separation of these models from SC, x86-TSO, PSO, and Relaxed, for which bounded consistency testing is either known (for SC), or shown here (for the rest), to be in polynomial time.

@article{paperbot2603,
  title = {How Hard Is Weak-Memory Testing?},
  author = {Soham Chakraborty and Shankara Narayanan Krishna and Umang Mathur and Andreas Pavlogiannis},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {8},
  number = {POPL},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1145/3632908}
}