Abstractions for validation in action
SFM'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication, and Software Systems: formal methods for model-driven engineering
Detecting problematic message sequences and frequencies in distributed systems
Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Lightweight snapshots and system-level backtracking
HotOS'13 Proceedings of the 14th USENIX conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
Race directed scheduling of concurrent programs
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
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Recent advances in symbolic execution have proposed a number of promising solutions to automatically achieve high-coverage and explore non-determinism during testing. This attractive testing technique of unmodified software assists developers with concrete inputs and deterministic schedules to analyze erroneous program paths. Being able to handle complex systems' software, these tools only consider single software instances and not their distributed execution which forms the core of distributed systems. The step to symbolic distributed execution is however steep, posing two core challenges: (1) additional state growth and (2) the state intra-dependencies resulting from communication. In this paper, we present SDE -- a novel approach enabling scalable symbolic execution of distributed systems. The key contribution of our work is two-fold. First, we generalize the problem space of SDE and develop an algorithm significantly eliminating redundant states during testing. The key idea is to benefit from the nodes' local communication minimizing the number of states representing the distributed execution. Second, we demonstrate the practical applicability of SDE in testing with three sensor net scenarios running Contiki OS.