Pono: A Flexible and Extensible SMT-Based Model Checker

Makai Mann, Ahmed Irfan, Florian Lonsing, Yahan Yang, Hongce Zhang, Kristopher Brown, Aarti Gupta, Clark Barrett

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

Symbolic model checking is an important tool for finding bugs (or proving the absence of bugs) in modern system designs. Because of this, improving the ease of use, scalability, and performance of model checking tools and algorithms continues to be an important research direction. In service of this goal, we present Pono, an open-source SMT-based model checker. Pono is designed to be both a research platform for developing and improving model checking algorithms, as well as a performance-competitive tool that can be used for academic and industry verification applications. In addition to performance, Pono prioritizes transparency (developed as an open-source project on GitHub), flexibility (Pono can be adapted to a variety of tasks by exploiting its general SMT-based interface), and extensibility (it is easy to add new algorithms and new back-end solvers). In this paper, we describe the design of the tool with a focus on the flexible and extensible architecture, cover its current capabilities, and demonstrate that Pono is competitive with state-of-the-art tools.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationComputer Aided Verification - 33rd International Conference, CAV 2021, Proceedings
EditorsAlexandra Silva, K. Rustan Leino
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages461-474
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783030816872
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event33rd International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jul 20 2021Jul 23 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12760 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference33rd International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/20/217/23/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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