E.6.4 Alternative Approach: More Capable Tools
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E.6.4 Alternative Approach: More Capable Tools

Although Promela and Spin are quite useful, much more capable tools are available, particularly for verifying hardware. This means that if it is possible to translate your algorithm to the hardware-design VHDL language, as it often will be for low-level parallel algorithms, then it is possible to apply these tools to your code (for example, this was done for the first realtime RCU algorithm). However, such tools can be quite expensive.

Although the advent of commodity multiprocessing might eventually result in powerful free-software model-checkers featuring fancy state-space-reduction capabilities, this does not help much in the here and now.

As an aside, there are Spin features that support approximate searches that require fixed amounts of memory, however, I have never been able to bring myself to trust approximations when verifying parallel algorithms.

Another approach might be to divide and conquer.