Selection of formal verification heuristics for parallel execution

• Autor(a) principal: Nacif, Jose Augusto
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Safe, Georgia Penido, Coelho Jr., Claudionor, Vieira, Luiz Filipe M., Val, Celina Gomes Do, Fernandes, Antonio Otavio
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: LOCUS Repositório Institucional da UFV
• Texto Completo: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10009-011-0204-z; http://www.locus.ufv.br/handle/123456789/21696
• topic: Formal verification; Parallel processing; Engine’ correlation; Design structural metrics

Functional verification is “the” major designphase bottleneck for silicon productivity. Since functional verification is an NP-complete problem, it relies on a large number of heuristics with associated parameters (engines). With the advent of parallel processing, formal verification can be optimized by selecting the best n engines to run in parallel, increasing the chance of reaching successful termination of the verification task. In this paper, we will present a methodology to build engine estimators based on structural metrics and to select n engines to run in parallel. The methodology considers both engines’ estimated performance and engines’ correlation. Results confirmed that the methodology can be a very quick selection mechanism for parallelization of engines in order to increase the chance of running the best engines to solve the problem.