Concurrency Testing at IIITB

There has been a rapid growth in the field of parallel programming over the past few years, primarily due to the advent of multi-core processors. The biggest challenge in concurrency is the uncontrollable non-determinism that it possesses due to the large number of interleaving that is possible among the processes or threads. Hence the traditional techniques employed for testing sequential programs cannot be used for testing concurrent software. Our goal is to develop a concurrency testing tool that allows users to test specific interleaving of the threads in a program. A sequence of thread interleaves is called an execution schedule. The tool provides a graphical interface to create and test these execution schedules. The tool also implements an automatic interleave generator based on bread first search. The tool allows the execution schedules to be stored and retrieved from a file. This helps in reproducing the defects caused by specific interleaving of the threads.