PVCoherence: Designing flat coherence protocols for scalable verification

The goal of this work is to design cache coherence protocols with many cores that can be verified with state-of-the-art automated verification methodologies. In particular, we focus on flat (non-hierarchical) coherence protocols, and we use a mostly-automated methodology based on parametric verification (PV). We propose several design guidelines that architects should follow if they want to design protocols that can be parametrically verified. We experimentally evaluate performance, storage overhead, and scalability of a protocol verified with PV compared to a highly optimized protocol that cannot be verified with PV.