ITR: Protocol Synthesis and Verification

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Projects of national importance critically depend on supercomputers, such as the ASCI White supercomputer deployed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Supercomputers such as these are comprised of thousands of microprocessors that share terabytes of main memory. In order to bring down the cost of these `shared memory' supercomputers and to ensure their error-free operation during long-running simulations, their design and verification complexity must be significantly reduced. A significant amount of this complexity exists in the concurrent protocols that allow the microprocessors to reliably share memory. The investigators study how to automatically synthesize these protocols from higher level descriptions that are easier (and hence quicker) to verify correct. This research involves a formal understanding of high performance protocols in use this area, the creation of a guided synthesis procedure that allows designers to quickly explore the space of protocols and select one that meets the performance goals, and then mathematically prove the correctness of the high level protocol as well as its translation to a detailed hardware-level protocol description. Design and verification tools that the industry can adopt are being developed.The distributed shared memory (DSM) is a dominant organizational paradigm for multiprocessor machines. DSM machines are used as desktop computers, supercomputers such as the 512-node ASCI White of Lawrence Livermore, and in future sold as single-chip multiprocessor components. The high verification complexity of DSM machines is known to delay the shipping dates of microprocessors and parallel processing software. This complexity stems from a host of DSM protocol design issues, such as: (i) aggressive latency hiding through out-of-order processing, implying the use of complex weak memory consistency models; (ii) complex protocol actions that require buffer reservation and deadlock avoidance. This research involves a formal understanding of weak memory models (captured as a theorem-prover library), and high performance protocols in use this area. It develops guided synthesis procedures that allow designers to quickly explore a wide spectrum of protocols. Once a high-level protocol meeting estimated performance goals is selected, model checking is employed to verify conformance against the chosen weak memory model. A mathematically proven (using theorem proving) translation procedure is then applied to obtain a detailed protocol description. This description is analyzed for performance and iterated till convergence. Examples drawn from industrial multiprocessors are used to illustrate our new methods. Design and verification tools that the industry can adopt are being developed.