Program Correctness by Transformation

Deductive program verification can be used effectively to verify high-level programs, but can be challenging for low-level, high-performance code. In this paper, we argue that compilation and program transformations should be made annotation-aware, i.e. during compilation and program transformation, not only the code should be changed, but also the corresponding annotations. As a result, if the original high-level program could be verified, also the resulting low-level program can be verified. We illustrate this approach on a concrete case, where loop annotations that capture possible loop parallelisations are translated into specifications of an OpenCL kernel that corresponds to the parallel loop. We also sketch how several commonly used OpenCL kernel transformations can be adapted to also transform the corresponding program annotations. Finally, we conclude the paper with a list of research challenges that need to be addressed to further develop this approach