Swarm Verification

Reportedly, supercomputer designer Seymour Cray once said that he would sooner use two strong oxen to plow afield than a thousand chickens. Although this is undoubtedly wise when it comes to plowing afield, it is not so clear for other types of tasks. Model checking problems are of the proverbial "search the needle in a haystack" type. Such problems can often be parallelized easily. Alas, none of the usual divide and conquer methods can be used to parallelize the working of a model checker. Given that it has become easier than ever to gain access to large numbers of computers to perform even routine tasks it is becoming more and more attractive to find alternate ways to use these resources to speed up model checking tasks. This paper describes one such method, called swarm verification.