Verifying dynamic power management schemes using statistical model checking

Dynamic power management (DPM) schemes, such as power gating, are important runtime strategies for saving power in multicore architectures. Safety and efficiency are probabilistic properties which need to be verified in order to evaluate a DPM scheme. In this work, we employ statistical model checking to verify probabilistic properties on Register Transfer Level (RTL) descriptions of multicores. Statistical model checking performs a system-level verification of the DPM scheme by simulating several sample paths of the entire RTL design until the verification results lie within tolerable bounds of error. We illustrate our approach on the RTL of OpenSPARC T2, a publicly available industry-strength multicore processor. We verify the safety and efficiency properties of several power gating schemes by considering the power manageable blocks in the floating-point graphics unit.