PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Scalable Dynamic Partial Order Reduction

Third Int. Conf. on Runtime Verification (RV2012), 25-28 September 2012, Istanbul, Turkey.

Jiri Simsa, Randy Bryant, Garth A. Gibson, Jason Hickey*

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

* Google, Inc., Mountain View CA 94043, USA

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Systematic testing, first demonstrated in small, specialized cases 15 years ago, has matured sufficiently for large-scale systems developers to begin to put it into practice. With actual deployment come new, pragmatic challenges to the usefulness of the techniques. In this paper we are concerned with scaling dynamic partial order reduction, a key technique for mitigating the state space explosion problem, to very large clusters. In particular, we present a new approach for distributed dynamic partial order reduction. Unlike previous work, our approach is based on a novel exploration algorithm that 1) enables trading space complexity for parallelism, 2) achieves efficient load-balancing through time-slicing, 3) provides for fault tolerance, which we consider a mandatory aspect of scalability, 4) scales to more than a thousand parallel workers, and 5) is guaranteed to avoid redundant exploration of overlapping portions of the state space.

FULL PAPER: pdf