On the Fly Testing of Regular Patterns in Distributed Computations

A class of properties of distributed computations is described and an algorithm which detects them is presented. This class of properties called regular patterns allows the user to specify an expected (or unwanted) behavior of a computation as sequences of relevant events (or as sequences of local predicates that must be successively verified). The sequences are defined by a finite state automaton (hence the name regular patterns) A computation verifies the property if and only if one of its causal paths matches a sequence.