ICCAD-2014 CAD contest in simultaneous CNF encoder optimization with SAT solver setting selection and benchmark suite: Special session paper: CAD contest

Efficiently solving numerous relevant circuit satisfiability (CircuitSAT) problems becomes a crucial industrial topic as the design scale expands. In this topic, we are especially interested in: how to select the best setting of the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver based on sample problems, and what is the most useful conjunctive normal form (CNF) encoding for some particular designs and particular applications. From practical experience, the run time yielded by solving SAT problems using the default setting is far from best run time; same is true for CNF encoding. In this contest, we ask the participants to design the algorithm for exploring the best setting based on some sample cases, and we determine the contest winners by evaluating the run time for solving the remaining problems. The benchmark suites are extracted from the real designs in our applications of interest. We look forward to triggering the academic area in further investigating this problem.