All posts by msoos

CryptoMiniSat and Parallel SAT Solving

Development, Research, SAT

Since CryptoMiniSat has been getting quite a number of awards with parallel SAT solving, it’s about time I talk about how it does that.There is a ton of literature on parallel SAT solving, and I unfortunately I have barely had time to read any of them. The only research within the parallel SAT solving area that I think has truly weathered the test of time is Plingeling and Treengeling — and they are really interesting to play with. The rest most likely  has some merit too, but I am usually suspect as the results are often –unintentionally — skewed to show how well the new idea performs and in the end they rarely win too many awards, especially not in the long run (this is where Plingeling and Treengeling truly shine). I personally haven’t published what I do in this scene because I have always found it to be a bit too easy and to hence have little merit for publication — but maybe one day I will.

Note: by unintentionally skewed results I mean that as you change parameters, some will inevitably be better than others because of randomness in the SAT solving. This randomness is easy to mistake for positive results. It has happened to everyone, I’m sure, including myself.

Exploiting CryptoMiniSat-specific features

CryptoMiniSat has many different inprocessing systems and many parameters to turn them on/off or to tune them. It has over 60k lines of code which allows this kind of flexibility. This is unlike the Maple*/Glucose* set of solvers, all coming from MiniSat, which basically can do one thing, and one thing only, really well. That seriously helps in the single-threaded setup, but may be an issue when it comes to multi-threading. They have (almost) no inprocessing (there is now vivification in some Maple* solvers), and no complicated preprocessing techniques other than BVE, subsumption and self-subsuming resolution. So, there is little to turn on and off, and there are very few parameters — and the few parameters that are there are all hard-coded into the solver, making them difficult to change.

CryptoMiniSat in parallel mode

To run in parallel mode, CMS takes advantage of its potential heterogeneity by running N different threads, each with radically different parameter settings, and exchanging nothing but unit and binary clauses(!) with the most rudimentary locking system. No exchange of longer clauses, no lockless exchanges, no complicated multi-lock system. One lock for unit clauses, one for binary, even for 24 threads. Is this inefficient? Yes, but it seems good enough, and I haven’t really had too many people asking for parallel performance. To illustrate, here are the parameter sets of the different threads used and here is the sharing and locking system. It’seriously simple, I suggest you take a peek, especially at the parameter sets.

Note that the literature is full of papers explaining what kind of complicated methods can be used to exchange clauses using different heuristics, with pretty graphs, complicated reasoning, etc. I have to admit that it might be useful to do that, however, just running heterogeneous solvers in parallel and exchanging unit&binary clauses performs really well. In fact, it performs so well that I never, ever, in the entire development history of 7 years of CMS, ran even one full experiment to check parallel performance. I usually concentrate on single-threaded performance because checking parallel performance is really expensive.

Checking the performance of a 24 thread setup is about 15x more expensive than the single-threaded variant. I don’t really want to burn the resources for that, as I think it’s good enough as it is. It’s mostly beating solvers with horrendously complicated systems inside them with many research papers backing them up, etc. I think the current performance is proof enough that making things complicated is not the only way to go. Maybe one day I will implement some more sophisticated clause sharing, e.g. sharing clauses that are longer than binary and then I won’t be able to claim that I am doing something quite simple. I will think about it.

Conclusions

I am kinda proud of the parallel performance of CMS as it can showcase the heterogeneity of the system and the different capabilities of the solver. It’s basically doing a form of acrobatics where the solver can behave like a very agile SAT solver with one set of parameters or like a huge monolith with another set of parameters. Since there are many different parameters, there are many different dimensions, and hence there are many orthogonal parameter sets. It’s sometimes interesting to read through the different parameter settings and wonder why one set works so much better than the other on a particular type of benchmark. Maybe there could be some value in investigating that.

CryptoMiniSat 5.6.3 Released

Development, Research, SAT, , , , ,

The latest CryptoMiniSat, version 5.6.3 has been released. This release marks the 12’000th commit to this solver that has weathered more than I originally intended it to weather. It’s been an interesting ride, and I have a lot to thank Kuldeep and NSCC‘s ASPIRE-1 cluster for this release. I have burned over 200k CPU hours to make this release, so it’s a pretty well-performing release (out-performing anything out there, by a wide margin), though I’m working very hard to make sure that neither I nor anyone else will have to burn anything close to that to make a well-performing SAT solver.

The solver has some interesting new algorithms inside, the most interesting of which is Gauss-Jordan elimination using a Simplex-like method, generously contributed by Jie-Hong Roland Jiang and Cheng-Shen Han from the National Taiwan University. This addition should finally settle the issues regarding Gaussian vs Gauss-Jordan elimination in SAT solvers. Note that to use this novel system, you must configure with “cmake -DUSE_GAUSS=ON ..” and then re-compile.

What’s also interesting is what’s not inside, though. I have been reading (maybe too much) Nassim Taleb and he is very much into via negativa. So I tried removing algorithms that have been in the solver for a while and mostly nobody would question if they are useful. In the end I removed the following algorithms from running by default, each removal leading to better solving time:

  • Regular probing. Intree probing is significantly better, so regular probing is not needed. Thanks Matti/Marijn/Armin!
  • Stamping. This was a big surprise, especially because I also had to remove caching, which is my own, crappy (“different”) version of stamping. I knew that it wasn’t always so good to have, but damn. It was a hard call, but if it’s just slowing it down, what can I do. It’s weird.
  • Burst searching. This is when I search for a short period with high randomness all over the search space. I thought it would allow me to explore the search space in places where VSIDS/Maple doesn’t. Why this is slowing the solver down so much may say more about search heuristics/variable bumping/clause bumping than anything.
  • Note that I never had blocked clause elimination. It doesn’t work well for incremental solving. In fact, it doesn’t work at all, though apparently the authors have some new work that allows it to work, super-interesting!

I’m nowadays committed to understanding this damned thing rather than adding another impossible-to-explain magic constant  to make the solving 10% faster. I think there is interesting stuff out there that could be done to make SAT solvers 10x, not 10%, faster.

IT Security Differently

security testing, , ,

Compliance and regulations are one way to achieve IT security. If one looks at industries that have been around for a very long time, and have very high stakes, for example commercial airline travel, mining, oil&gas, etc., one can find compliance and regulations everywhere. It’s how safety is managed in these environments. I have always been fascinated with safety incidents and read a lot of reports around them — these are almost always free to read and very detailed, unlike IT security incident reports. See for example the now very famous Challenger Accident Report (“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”) or the similarly famous, and more recent AF-447 accident report. These are fascinating reads and if you are willing to read between the lines, they all talk about systems issues — not a single person making a single mistake.
Continue reading IT Security Differently →

Testing and pentesting, a road to effectiveness

security testing, ,

I have been involved in computer security and security testing for a while and I think it’s time to talk about some aspects of it that get ignored, mostly for the worse. Let me just get this out of the way: security testing (or pentesting, if you like) and testing are very closely related.

The Testing Pyramid

What’s really good about security testing being so close to testing is that you can apply the standard, well-know and widely used techniques from testing to the relatively new field of security testing. First of all, this chart:

Continue reading Testing and pentesting, a road to effectiveness →

Non-reproducible results with MapleCOMSPS

SAT

I’ve been reading through the source code of the 2016 SAT Competition Main Track winner, MapleCOMSPS_DRUP, and I found that it has an important piece of code, regulating its behaviour that depends on timing:

static bool switch_mode = false;
static void SIGALRM_switch(int signum) { switch_mode = true; }

lbool Solver::solve_()
{
    signal(SIGALRM, SIGALRM_switch);
    alarm(2500);

Continue reading Non-reproducible results with MapleCOMSPS →