A Novel Approach to Parameterized Verification of Cache Coherence Protocols

Parameterized verification of parameterized protocols like cache coherence protocols is an important but hard problem. Our tool paraVerifier handles this hard problem in a unified framework: (1) it automatically discovers auxiliary invariants and the corresponding causal relations from a small reference instance of the verified protocol; (2) the above invariants and causal relation information are automatically generalized into a parameterized form to construct a parameterized formal proof in a theorem prover (e.g., Isabelle). Our method is successfully applied to typical benchmarks including snooping and directory cache coherence protocol benchmarks. The correctness of these protocols is guaranteed by a formal and readable proof which is automatically generated. The notoriously hard FLASH protocol, which is at an industrial scale, is also verified.