z3/PARALLEL_PROJECT_NOTES.md

Parallel project notes

We track notes for updates to smt/parallel.cpp and possibly solver/parallel_tactic.cpp.

Variable selection heuristics

• Lookahead solvers:
  • lookahead in the smt directory performs a simplistic lookahead search using unit propagation.
  • lookahead in the sat directory uses custom lookahead solver based on MARCH. March is described in Handbook of SAT and Knuth volumne 4.
  • They both proxy on a cost model where the most useful variable to branch on is the one that minimizes the set of new clauses maximally through unit propagation. In other words, if a literal p is set to true, and p occurs in clause \neg p \vee q \vee r, then it results in reducing the clause from size 3 to 2 (because \neg p will be false after propagating p).
  • Selected references: SAT handbook, Knuth Volumne 4, Marijn's March solver on github, implementation of march in z3
• VSIDS:
  • As referenced in Matteo and Antti's solvers.
  • Variable activity is a proxy for how useful it is to case split on a variable during search. Variables with a higher VSIDS are split first.
  • VSIDS is updated dynamically during search. It was introduced in the paper with Moscovitz, Malik, et al in early 2000s. A good overview is in Armin's tutorial slides (also in my overview of SMT).
  • VSIDS does not keep track of variable phases (if the variable was set to true or false).
  • Selected refernces DAC 2001 and Biere Tutorial, slide 64 on Variable Scoring Schemes
• Proof prefix:
  • Collect the literals that occur in learned clauses. Count their occurrences based on polarity. This gets tracked in a weighted score.
  • The weight function can be formulated to take into account clause sizes.
  • The score assignment may also decay similar to VSIDS.
  • We could also use a doubly linked list for literals used in conflicts and keep reinsert literals into the list when they are used. This would be a "Variable move to front" (VMTF) variant.
  • Selected references: Battleman et al
• From local search:
  • Note also that local search solvers can be used to assign variable branch priorities.
  • We are not going to directly run a local search solver in the mix up front, but let us consider this heuristic for completeness.
  • The heuristic is documented in Biere and Cai's journal paper on integrating local search for CDCL.
  • Roughly, it considers clauses that move from the UNSAT set to the SAT set of clauses. It then keeps track of the literals involved.
  • Selected references: Cai et al
• Assignment trails:
  • We could also consider the assignments to variables during search.
  • Variables that are always assigned to the same truth value could be considered to be safe to assign that truth value.
  • The cubes resulting from such variables might be a direction towards finding satisfying solutions.
  • Selected references: Alex and Vadim and most recently Robin et al.

Algorithms

This section considers various possible algorithms. In the following, F refers to the original goal, T is the number of CPU cores or CPU threads.

Base algorithm

The existing algorithm in smt_parallel is as follows:

1. Run a solver on F with a bounded number of conflicts.
2. If the result is SAT/UNSAT, or UNKNOWN with an interrupt or timeout, return. If the maximal number of conflicts were reached continue.
3. Spawn T solvers on F with a bounded number of conflicts, wait until a thread returns UNSAT/SAT or all threads have reached a maximal number of conflicts.
4. Perform a similar check as in 2.
5. Share unit literals learned by each thread.
6. Compute unit cubes for each thread T.
7. Spawn T solvers with F \wedge \ell, where \ell is a unit literal determined by lookahead function in each thread.
8. Perform a similar check as in 2. But note that a thread can be UNSAT because the unit cube \ell contradicted F. In this case learn the unit literal \neg \ell.
9. Shared unit literals learned by each thread, increase the maximal number of conflicts, go to 3.

Algorithm Variants

• Instead of using lookahead solving to find unit cubes use the proof-prefix based scoring function.
• Instead of using independent unit cubes, perform a systematic (where systematic can mean many things) cube and conquer strategy.
• Spawn some threads to work in "SAT" mode, tuning to find models instead of short resolution proofs.
• Change the synchronization barrier discipline.
• [Future] Include in-processing

Cube and Conquer strategy

We could maintain a global decomposition of the search space by maintaing a list of cubes. Initially, the list of cubes has just one element, the cube with no literals [ [] ]. By using a list of cubes instead of a set of cubes we can refer to an ordering. For example, cubes can be ordered by a suffix traversal of the cube tree (the tree formed by case splitting on the first literal, children of the true branch are the cubes where the first literal is true, children of the false branch are the cubes where the first literal is false).

The main question is going to be how the cube decomposition is created.

Static cubing

We can aim for a static cube strategy that uses a few initial (concurrent) probes to find cube literals. This strategy would be a parallel implementaiton of proof-prefix approach. The computed cubes are inserted into the list of cubes and the list is consumed by a second round.

Growing cubes on demand

Based on experiences with cubing so far, there is high variance in how easy cubes are to solve. Some cubes will be harder than others to solve. For hard cubes, it is tempting to develop a recursive cubing strategy. Ideally, a recursive cubing strategy is symmetric to top-level cubing.

• The solver would have to identify hard cubes vs. easy cubes.

• It would have to know when to stop working on a hard cube and replace it in the list of cubes by a new list of sub-cubes.

• Ideally, we don't need any static cubing and cubing is grown on demand while all threads are utilized.

  • If we spawn T threads to initially work with empty cubes, we could extract up to T indepenent cubes by examining the proof-prefix of their traces. This can form the basis for the first, up to 2^T cubes.
  • After a round of solving with each thread churning on some cubes, we may obtain more proof-prefixes from hard cubes. It is not obvious that we want to share cubes from different proof prefixes at this point. But a starting point is to split a hard cube into two by using the proof-prefix from attempting to solve it.
  • Suppose we take the proof-prefix sampling algorithm at heart: It says to start with some initial cube prefix and then sample for other cube literals. If we translate it to the case where multiple cubes are being processed in parallel, then an analogy is to share candidates for new cube literals among cubes that are close to each-other. For example, if thread t_1 processes cube a, b, c and t_2 processes a,b, \neg c. They are close. They are only separated by Hamming distance 1. If t_1 finds cube literal d and t_2 finds cube literal e, we could consider the cubes a, b, c, d, e, and a, b, c, d, \neg e, \ldots, a, b, \neg c, \neg d, \neg e.

Representing cubes implicitly

We can represent a list of cubes by using intervals and only represent start and end-points of the intervals.

Batching

Threads can work on more than one cube in a batch.

Synchronization

• The first thread to time out or finish could kill other threads instead of joining on all threads to finish.
• Instead of synchronization barriers have threads continue concurrently without terminating. They synchronize on signals and new units. This is trickier to implement, but in some guises accomplished in sat/sat_parallel.cpp

Parameter tuning

The idea is to have parallel threads try out different parameter settings and search the parameter space of an optimal parameter setting.

Let us assume that there is a set of tunable parameters P. The set comprises of a set of named parameters with initial values. P = \{ (p_1, v_1), \ldots, (p_n, v_n) \}. With each parameter associate a set of mutation functions +=, -=, *=, such as increment, decrement, scale a parameter by a non-negative multiplier (which can be less than 1). We will initialize a search space of parameter settings by parameters, values and mutation functions that have assigned reward values. The reward value is incremented if a parameter mutation step results in an improvement, and decremented if a mutation step degrades performance. P = \{ (p_1, v_1, \{ (r_{11}, m_{11}), \ldots, (r_{1k_1}, m_{1k_1}) \}), \ldots, (p_n, v_n, \{ (r_{n1}, m_{n1}), \ldots, (r_{nk_n}, m_{nk_n})\}) \}. The initial values of reward functions is fixed (to 1) and the initial values of parameters are the defaults.

• The batch manager maintains a set of candidate parameters CP = \{ (P_1, r_1), \ldots, (P_n, r_n) \}.
• A worker thread picks up a parameter P_i from CP from the batch manager.
• It picks one or more parameter settings within P_i whose mutation function have non-zero reward functions and applies a mutation.
• It then runs with a batch of cubes.
• It measures the reward for the new parameter setting based in number of cubes, cube depth, number of timeouts, and completions with number of conflicts.
• If the new reward is an improvement over (P_i, r_i) it inserts the new parameter setting (P_i', r_i') into the batch manager.
• The batch manager discards the worst parameter settings keeping the top K (K = 5) parameter settings.

When picking among mutation steps with reward functions use a weighted sampling algorithm. Weighted sampling works as follows: You are given a set of items with weights (i_1, w_1), \ldots, (i_k, w_k). Add w = \sum_j w_j. Pick a random number w_0 in the range 0\ldots w. Then you pick item i_n such that n is the smallest index with \sum_{j = 1}^n w_j \geq w_0.

SMT parameters that could be tuned:

  arith.bprop_on_pivoted_rows (bool) (default: true)
  arith.branch_cut_ratio (unsigned int) (default: 2)
  arith.eager_eq_axioms (bool) (default: true)
  arith.enable_hnf (bool) (default: true)
  arith.greatest_error_pivot (bool) (default: false)
  arith.int_eq_branch (bool) (default: false)
  arith.min (bool) (default: false)
  arith.nl.branching (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.cross_nested (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.delay (unsigned int) (default: 10)
  arith.nl.expensive_patching (bool) (default: false)
  arith.nl.expp (bool) (default: false)
  arith.nl.gr_q (unsigned int) (default: 10)
  arith.nl.grobner (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.grobner_cnfl_to_report (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  arith.nl.grobner_eqs_growth (unsigned int) (default: 10)
  arith.nl.grobner_expr_degree_growth (unsigned int) (default: 2)
  arith.nl.grobner_expr_size_growth (unsigned int) (default: 2)
  arith.nl.grobner_frequency (unsigned int) (default: 4)
  arith.nl.grobner_max_simplified (unsigned int) (default: 10000)
  arith.nl.grobner_row_length_limit (unsigned int) (default: 10)
  arith.nl.grobner_subs_fixed (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  arith.nl.horner (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.horner_frequency (unsigned int) (default: 4)
  arith.nl.horner_row_length_limit (unsigned int) (default: 10)
  arith.nl.horner_subs_fixed (unsigned int) (default: 2)
  arith.nl.nra (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.optimize_bounds (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.order (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.propagate_linear_monomials (bool) (default: true)
  arith.nl.rounds (unsigned int) (default: 1024)
  arith.nl.tangents (bool) (default: true)
  arith.propagate_eqs (bool) (default: true)
  arith.propagation_mode (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  arith.random_initial_value (bool) (default: false)
  arith.rep_freq (unsigned int) (default: 0)
  arith.simplex_strategy (unsigned int) (default: 0)
  dack (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  dack.eq (bool) (default: false)
  dack.factor (double) (default: 0.1)
  dack.gc (unsigned int) (default: 2000)
  dack.gc_inv_decay (double) (default: 0.8)
  dack.threshold (unsigned int) (default: 10)
  delay_units (bool) (default: false)
  delay_units_threshold (unsigned int) (default: 32)
  dt_lazy_splits (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  lemma_gc_strategy (unsigned int) (default: 0)
  phase_caching_off (unsigned int) (default: 100)
  phase_caching_on (unsigned int) (default: 400)
  phase_selection (unsigned int) (default: 3)
  qi.eager_threshold (double) (default: 10.0)
  qi.lazy_threshold (double) (default: 20.0)
  qi.quick_checker (unsigned int) (default: 0)
  relevancy (unsigned int) (default: 2)
  restart_factor (double) (default: 1.1)
  restart_strategy (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  seq.max_unfolding (unsigned int) (default: 1000000000)
  seq.min_unfolding (unsigned int) (default: 1)
  seq.split_w_len (bool) (default: true)

Probing parameter tuning

A first experiment with parameter tuning can be performed using the Python API. The idea is to run a solver with one update to parameters at a time and measure progress measures. The easiest is to use number of decisions per conflict as a proxy for progress. Finer-grained progress can be measured by checking glue levels of conflicts and average depth (depth of decisions before a conflict).

Roughly,

max_conflicts = 5000

params = [("smt.arith.eager_eq_axioms", False), ("smt.restart_factor", 1.2), 
          ("smt.restart_factor", 1.4), ("smt.relevancy", 0), ("smt.phase_caching_off", 200), ("smt.phase_caching_on", 600) ] # etc

for benchmark in benchmarks:
   scores = {}
   for n, v in params:
      s = SimpleSolver()
      s.from_file(benchmarkfile)
      s.set("smt.auto_config", False)
      s.set(n, v)
      s.set("smt.max_conflicts", max_conflicts)
      r = s.check()
      st = s.statistics()
      d = st.num_decisions()
      scores[(n, v)] = d

It can filter

Benchmark setup

Prepare benchmark data

Data

QF_LIA            - heavily skewed for selected benchmarks
QF_NIA_small  

Others we should try:

Certora
QF_ABV
QF_UFBV
QF_AUFBV (or whatever it is called)
QF_UFLIA (might be too small)

push more instances from smtlib.org benchmarks into z3-poly-testing/inputs or upload tgz files directly in setup.

Naming conventions and basic parameters

The first rounds created a base-line where all features were turned off, then it created variants where one feature was turned off at a time. The data-point where all but one feature is turned off could tell us something if a feature has a chance of being useful in isolation. The following is a sample naming scheme for associated settings.

threads-1
-T:30 smt.threads=1 tactic.default_tactic=smt

threads-4-none-unbounded
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=true smt_parallel.share_conflicts=false smt_parallel.share_units=false smt.threads.max_conflicts=4294967295

threads-4-none
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=true smt_parallel.share_conflicts=false smt_parallel.share_units=false 

threads-4-shareunits
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=true smt_parallel.share_conflicts=false smt_parallel.share_units=true 

threads-4-cube-frugal
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=false smt_parallel.frugal_cube_only=true smt_parallel.share_conflicts=false smt_parallel.share_units=false

threads-4-cube-frugal-shareconflicts
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=false smt_parallel.frugal_cube_only=true smt_parallel.share_conflicts=true smt_parallel.share_units=false 

threads-4-shareunits-nonrelevant
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=true smt_parallel.share_conflicts=true smt_parallel.share_units=false smt_parallel.relevant_units_only=false 

threads-4-cube
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=false smt_parallel.frugal_cube_only=false smt_parallel.share_conflicts=false smt_parallel.share_units=false 

threads-4-cube-shareconflicts
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.never_cube=false smt_parallel.frugal_cube_only=false smt_parallel.share_conflicts=true smt_parallel.share_units=false 


threads-4-cube-maxdepth-10
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.share_conflicts=false smt_parallel.share_units=false smt_parallel.max_cube_depth=10

threads-4-cube-shareconflicts
-T:30 smt.threads=4 tactic.default_tactic=smt smt_parallel.share_conflicts=true smt_parallel.share_units=false smt_parallel.frugal_depth_splitting_only=true

Ideas for other knobs that can be tested

Only cube on literals that exist in initial formula. Don't cube on literals created during search (such as by theory lemmas).

Only share units for literals that exist in the initial formula.

Vary the backoff scheme for max_conflict_mul from 1.5 to lower and higher.

Vary smt.threads.max_conflicts.

Replace backoff scheme by a geometric scheme: add conflict_inc (a new parameter) every time and increment conflict_inc.

Revert backoff if a cube is solved.

Delay lemma and unit sharing.

Vary max_cube_size, or add a parameter to grow max_cube_size if initial attempts to conquer reach max_conflicts.

  cube_initial_only (bool) (default: false)          only useful when never_cube=false
  frugal_cube_only (bool) (default: false)           only useful when never_cube=false
  max_conflict_mul (double) (default: 1.5)
  max_cube_size (unsigned int) (default: 20)         only useful when never_cube=false
  never_cube (bool) (default: false)
  relevant_units_only (bool) (default: true)         only useful when share_units=true
  share_conflicts (bool) (default: true)             only useful when never_cube=false
  share_units (bool) (default: true)
  share_units_initial_only (bool) (default: false)   only useful when share_units=true