The security of the national computing infrastructure is critical for consumer confidence, protection of privacy, protection of valuable intellectual property, and even national security. Logic-based approaches to security have been gaining popularity, in part because they provide a precise way to describe and reason about the kinds of complexity found in real systems. Perhaps even more importantly, automated reasoning techniques can be used to assist users in navigating this complexity. Despite the promise of automated reasoning, its use in practical applications is still limited. One of the primary reasons for this is that for many problems, automated reasoning methods are not fast enough, especially for use in interactive environments (such as browser plug-ins in desktop computing, or mobile applications running on smart phones and PDAs). This project aims to address the performance weakness of automated reasoning by investigating novel designs and algorithms with the unifying theme of exploiting parallelism. The project will focus on three main areas of automated deduction: Boolean satisfiability, first-order reasoning, and satisfiability modulo theories.
TC: EAGER: Collaborative Research: Parallel Automated Reasoning