Formal probabilistic analysis of distributed dynamic thermal management

The prevalence of Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) schemes coupled with demands for high reliability motivate the rigorous verification and testing of these schemes before deployment. Conventionally, these schemes are analyzed using either simulations or by running on real systems. But these traditional analysis techniques cannot exhaustively validate the distributed DTM schemes and thus compromise on the accuracy of the analysis results. Moreover, the randomness due to task assignments, task completion times and re-mappings, is often ignored in the analysis of distributed DTM schemes. We propose to overcome both of these limitations by using probabilistic model checking, which is a formal method for modeling and verifying concurrent systems with randomized behaviors. The paper presents a case study on the formal verification of a state-of-the-art distributed DTM scheme using the PRISM model checker.