ACCTEST: Hybrid Testing Techniques for MPI-Based Programs

Recently, MPI has become widely used in many scientific applications, including different non-computer science fields, for parallelizing their applications. An MPI programming model is used for supporting parallelism in several programming languages, including C, C, and Fortran. MPI also supports integration with some programming models and has several implementations from different vendors, including open-source and commercial implementations. However, testing parallel programs is a difficult task, especially when using programming models with different behaviours and types of error based on the programming model type. In addition, the increased use of these programming models by non-computer science specialists can cause several errors due to lack of experience in programming, which needs to be considered when using any testing tools. We noticed that dynamic testing techniques have been used for testing the majority of MPI programs. The dynamic testing techniques detect errors by analyzing the source code during runtime, which will cause overheads, and this will affect the programs performance, especially when targeting massive parallel applications generating thousands or millions of threads. In this paper, we enhance ACCTEST to have the ability to test MPI-based programs and detect runtime errors occurring with different types of MPI communications. We decided to use hybrid-testing techniques by combining both static and dynamic testing techniques to gain the benefit of each and reduce the cost.