A divide & conquer approach to testing concurrent programs with JPF

Abstract

Java Pathfinder (JPF) is one of the most mature software model checker developed by NASA for detecting errors lurking in concurrent Java programs. However, the use of JPF often leads to the state space explosion due to the non-determinism of thread interleavings. Parallelization is one mainstream technique to deal with the problem by utilizing the advantage of multi-core processors. Hence, making JPF parallelized to improve the performance in verifying programs is highly desired. In this paper, we present a divide & conquer approach to splitting the entire state space into multiple layers, in which each layer consists of many sub-state spaces so that JPF can independently verify such sub-state spaces in parallel. Some experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique mitigates the state space explosion that prevents the use of only one JPF instance from conducting model checking.