  Predicate abstraction is a key enabling technology for applying finite-state
model checkers to programs written in mainstream languages. It has been used
very successfully for debugging sequential system-level C code. Although model
checking was originally designed for analyzing concurrent systems, there is
little evidence of fruitful applications of predicate abstraction to
shared-variable concurrent software. The goal of this paper is to close this
gap. We have developed a symmetry-aware predicate abstraction strategy: it
takes into account the replicated structure of C programs that consist of many
threads executing the same procedure, and generates a Boolean program template
whose multi-threaded execution soundly overapproximates the concurrent C
program. State explosion during model checking parallel instantiations of this
template can now be absorbed by exploiting symmetry. We have implemented our
method in the SATABS predicate abstraction framework, and demonstrate its
superior performance over alternative approaches on a large range of
synchronization programs.
