EPSRC logo

Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/S028641/1
Title: Verification of Hardware Concurrency via Model Learning (CLeVer)
Principal Investigator: Silva, Professor A
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Dr M Sammartino
Project Partners:
ARM Ltd
Department: Computer Science
Organisation: UCL
Scheme: Standard Research
Starts: 01 October 2019 Ends: 31 March 2025 Value (£): 692,958
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Fundamentals of Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Electronics
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Panel DatePanel NameOutcome
17 Jan 2019 EPSRC ICT Prioritisation Panel January 2019 Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Our society is increasingly reliant on digital devices that are capable of performing several tasks at the same time: tablets, smartphones, our personal computers, they all contain processors capable of executing multiple instructions concurrently. Bugs in these processors, such as the recent Meltdown and Spectre, can seriously compromise the security and safety of their users. As the complexity of these systems increases, there is a pressing need to automate the assessment of their correctness, especially with respect to concurrency-related aspects.

Formal verification is a highly effective technique to automatically check important properties of systems.

It relies on a machine-readable abstraction of the actual system---a model. A key strength of formal verification is that, when the model is accurate enough, it is able to find bugs that would be hard to find and reproduce using traditional testing alone. However, these models are usually built by humans and as such can be error-prone and inaccurate. Moreover, sophisticated concurrent behaviours such as weak-memory concurrency make modelling even more challenging.

The overall goal of this project is to develop a verification framework for hardware systems that uses artificial intelligence to automatically build and verify better models. Ultimately, this will lead to lower production costs and more reliable hardware.

This is particularly important for companies that design hardware units destined to large-scale production, such as ARM: a bug in the design may lead to millions of faulty units being manufactured.

The novel idea behind this project is to rely on the model learning paradigm, originally proposed in AI, to automatically build a model of a running system in a black-box fashion---from a series of observations of the behaviour of the system. This approach can be very effective in taming complexity and achieving scalability: by treating the whole system, or some of its components, as black-boxes, one can fine-tune the level of detail of the model and focus the analysis on specific features.

In recent years model learning has started to be successfully applied in a variety of academic and industrial contexts. However, the models developed using this approach are all inherently sequential. The verification of concurrent behaviour in hardware systems is an unexplored, challenging, and potentially rewarding application that this project proposes to explore.
Key Findings
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Potential use in non-academic contexts
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Summary
Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Project URL:  
Further Information:  
Organisation Website: