A Novel Approach for Bounded Model Checking Through Full Parallelism

Abstract

Bounded Model Checking (BMC) has been found promising in finding deep vulnerabilities in industry designs and scaling well with design sizes. However, the parallelisation of BMC is challenging, due to the propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem and satisfiability modulo theories problem solving being hard to parallelise. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to perform BMC based on the mathematical model of probe machine, which is the first approach to employ probe machine to accelerate BMC, particularly it can solve SAT formulas in full parallel. We introduce the workflow of the algorithm and explain in detail the process of mapping BMC to the probe machine. A method is provided to prove the correctness of the algorithm and to analyze its time complexity. We develop a model checker called BMC2PROBE based on our approach and explain the framework and memory management of the tool. The experiment results are discussed, which prove the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.