High performance software testing on SIMD machines

A method for high-performance, software testing, called mutant unification, is described. The method is designed to support program mutation on parallel machines based on the single instruction multiple data stream (SIMD) paradigm. Several parameters that affect the performance of unification have been identified and their effect on the time to completion of a mutation test cycle and speedup has been studied. Program mutation analysis provides an effective means for determining the reliability of large software systems and a systematic method for measuring the adequacy of test data. However, it is likely that testing large software systems using mutation is computation bound and prohibitive on traditional sequential machines. Current, implementations of mutation tools are unacceptably slow and are only suitable for testing relatively small programs. The proposed unification method provides a practical alternative to the current approaches. The method also opens up a new application domain for SIMD machines