An Experience in Ada Multicore Programming: Parallelisation of a Model Checking Engine

Even if multicore architectures are nowadays extremely wide-spread, the exploitation of this easily available degree of parallelism is not always straightforward. In this paper we describe the experience gained in our ongoing effort to parallelise the model checking engine of a family of model checkers (KandISTI) developed at ISTI. The main focus of our experimentation is the evaluation of the minimal efforts needed to take advantage of our everyday multicore hardware for model checking purposes. Our early results relative to an initial fragment of the logic show a speedup factor of about 2.5 when 4 physical cores are available. This result, however, can only be achieved by complementing the initial high level Ada design with a second round of code fine-tuning which exploits nonstandard low level features in the implementation of the needed thread-safe data structures.