Correctness of a directory-based cache coherence protocol: Early experience

Cache coherence protocols of increasing complexities call for automated verification tools which are both efficient and reliable. Most current approaches can only verify protocols at a high level of abstraction and the model size is limited to a small number of interacting processes. By using a simple full-map directory scheme as example, we present a verification technique which is extremely efficient and is independent of the model size. Several non-obvious problems affecting the correctness of a protocol design are identified by the verification procedure