Course Project Information, COMP 408 (Spring 1997)

There are four components to the course project:

• Project Proposal: A 3-5 page report describing the problem you are working on and the techniques you expect to use to verify it. Your grade will be based on how well you described the problem and how realistic your expectations are as to how you will verify it. Due in class on Wednesday, March 12.

• Verification of Problem: The actual verification work you do using the software tools introduced in the course. Your grade will be based on how well you applied the tools to your problem.

• Project Presentation: A presentation made to the class in the penultimate week of the semester describing the problem and how you went about verifying it. Your grade will be based on the clarity and thoroughness of your presentation.

• Project Report: A report of approximately 10 pages describing how you specified and verified the problem and how your actual experience differed from the expectations set out in your proposal. Your grade will be based on the thoroughness and clarity of your report. Due by the last day of classes.

Project Proposal

Note: You should not work on the verification aspects of the project until after I have graded your project proposal. Therefore, if you want to work on the verification aspects of your project during the break, you must turn in your project proposal before break.

• What does the system do?

• What is the high-level architecture/algorithm of the system? Use diagrams if appropriate.

• What are the desired properties of the system? Properties should be explained in English, not stated in any of the logics we have discussed.

• What techniques do you expect to use to verify this system? For example, you should indicate where you will use model checking and where you will use theorem proving. If you intend to use abstraction to verify the system, explain in English what you expect to have to abstract (for example: I expect to abstract the 8-bit counter to a non-deterministic 2-bit counter). Justify your claims (for example, "Part X will require abstraction because it has Y states, which I believe will be too many for effective model checking", "I believe theorem proving will be a more straightfoward approach for part X because of ...", etc).

• What aspects of the verification do you expect to be the most challenging and why?

Verification of Problem

1. Use the approaches interactively to verify the design. The interaction between the approaches should be natural for the problem. For example, for the systolic array element, we could have verified the behavior of a single stage using model checking, then verified how the results from the individual stages compose into a result on the entire circuit using theorem proving. It would not have been natural to simply pick some properties to theorem prove and some to model check, unless those you verified using theorem proving were not amenable to model checking due to the size of the design.

2. Use each approach separately to verify the design. In this case, your project is more of a case study in different approaches and I expect your final report to compare and contrast the practicality of the two approaches relative to your design in some detail.

Presentation

• A brief overview of the design you are verifying.
• The properties you want to verify (also brief).
• How you modeled the design.
• The techniques you are using to verify your design. Discuss (as appropriate to your project) where you are using abstractions, how you are decomposing problems, how you are using each of model-checking and theorem-proving, etc.
• Discussion of which aspects of the project have been easy or difficult to verify.

You can do your presentation either using the overhead projector or using handouts and the whiteboard.

Final Project Report

• A description of the problem you worked on. While this material may be largely repeated from the project proposal, I expect that you will have incorporated any comments I made regarding your problem statement from the proposal into the writeup in the final report.

• Formal statements of the properties you verified and appropriate statistics on how long it took for them to verify.

• An analysis of how rigorous and/or complete you feel your verification was.

• A discussion of how you used both theorem proving and model checking. If you used both on the same aspects of a single problem, discuss which approach you feel was more suitable for the problem and why.

• An analysis of your expectations from the project proposal. Indicate where your expectations varied from your actual experience and try to describe what you had not anticipated in each case. Also indicate where your experience matched your expectations.