Achieving speedups in distributed symbolic reachability analysis through asynchronous computation

  • Authors:

  • Orna Grumberg;Tamir Heyman;Nili Ifergan;Assaf Schuster

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel;Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel;Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel;Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel

  • Venue:
  • CHARME'05 Proceedings of the 13 IFIP WG 10.5 international conference on Correct Hardware Design and Verification Methods
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel BDD-based distributed algorithm for reachability analysis which is completely asynchronous. Previous BDD-based distributed schemes are synchronous: they consist of interleaved rounds of computation and communication, in which the fastest machine (or one which is lightly loaded) must wait for the slowest one at the end of each round. We make two major contributions. First, the algorithm performs image computation and message transfer concurrently, employing non-blocking protocols in several layers of the communication and the computation infrastructures. As a result, regardless of the scale and type of the underlying platform, the maximal amount of resources can be utilized efficiently. Second, the algorithm incorporates an adaptive mechanism which splits the workload, taking into account the availability of free computational power. In this way, the computation can progress more quickly because, when more CPUs are available to join the computation, less work is assigned to each of them. Less load implies additional important benefits, such as better locality of reference, less overhead in compaction activities (such as reorder), and faster and better workload splitting. We implemented the new approach by extending a symbolic model checker from Intel. The effectiveness of the resulting scheme is demonstrated on a number of large industrial designs as well as public benchmark circuits, all known to be hard for reachability analysis. Our results show that the asynchronous algorithm enables efficient utilization of higher levels of parallelism. High speedups are reported, up to an order of magnitude, for computing reachability for models with higher memory requirements than was previously possible.