Chaff: engineering an efficient SAT solver

Boolean Satisfiability is probably the most studied of combinatorial optimization/search problems. Significant effort has been devoted to trying to provide practical solutions to this problem for problem instances encountered in a range of applications in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), as well...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Moskewicz, Matthew W., Madigan, Conor F., Zhao, Ying, Zhang, Lintao, Malik, Sharad
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Engineering
Artificial intelligence
Business continuity
Computer systems organization > Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
Design automation
Design engineering
Electronic design automation and methodology
Electronics packaging
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Performance
Hardware > Robustness
Logic testing
Networks > Network performance evaluation
NP-complete problem
Performance gain
Permission
Theory of computation > Computational complexity and cryptography > Interactive proof systems
Theory of computation > Computational complexity and cryptography > Proof complexity
Theory of computation > Logic > Proof theory
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Summary:Boolean Satisfiability is probably the most studied of combinatorial optimization/search problems. Significant effort has been devoted to trying to provide practical solutions to this problem for problem instances encountered in a range of applications in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), as well as in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This study has culminated in the development of several SAT packages, both proprietary and in the public domain (e.g. GRASP, SATO) which find significant use in both research and industry. Most existing complete solvers are variants of the Davis-Putnam (DP) search algorithm. In this paper we describe the development of a new complete solver, Chaff, which achieves significant performance gains through careful engineering of all aspects of the search - especially a particularly efficient implementation of Boolean constraint propagation (BCP) and a novel low overhead decision strategy. Chaff has been able to obtain one to two orders of magnitude performance improvement on difficult SAT benchmarks in comparison with other solvers (DP or otherwise), including GRASP and SATO.
ISSN:0738-100X
DOI:10.1145/378239.379017