Accelerating assertion assessment using GPUs

In this paper, we show how two key techniques in the testing and verification areas - namely mutation testing and assertion based verification (ABV) - can be combined in a novel way to help improve the effectiveness of verifying design correctness. Through assertion based test generation, multiple mutated designs and their test sequences are concurrently simulated using a GPU, in order to determine an essential question in ABV: are the assertions effective at identifying design errors? Exploiting multiple parallelism factors, we show notable improvements in accelerating the simulations procedures that help to answer this fundamental question.