Message Passing Parallel Programming Test Their Communications Environment

Test is of great significance in the development of software. This thesis focuses on the test of parallel programs. Message-passing paradigm and shared-memory paradigm are two commonly used parallel programming models, while the former will be our main concern.Considering the portability and scalability, at present, most of the distributed application systems are based on message-passing environment which isolates the application systems from architecture (computer, network, operating system, etc.). In order to demonstrate the executive mechanism of message-passing programs, the function and communication performance of the message-passing environment such as MPI(Message Passing Interface), PVM(Parallel Virtual Machine) and BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms) are discussed in detail.The faults in parallel programs can be divided into control-flow faults and timing-sequence faults. In accordance with their properties, the timing-sequence faults are further classified into timing-sequence logic faults and timing-sequence performance faults. Because these three types of faults are of great difference and there exists no direct causal relationship among them, the test on parallel programs is divided into three independent steps: (1) control-flow test, (2) timing-sequence logic test and (3)timing-sequence performance test.With respect to the control-flow faults in the parallel programs, ParCT (Parallel C-language Testing tools) is presented to illustrate the implementation, critical techniques and functions of control-flow testing tools. The characteristics of ParCT include ease of use, portability, C-language and FORTRAN-language binding, little impact on tested system and low storage-cost, etc..Modeling is the foundation of test. Event-driven technique, which describes the execution of programs via the sequence of events, is exploited in the modeling of timing-sequence test. In this paper events only refer to the occurrences related to the inter-process communication, which are called SYN-events. The timing-sequence test of message-passing programs are wholly established above the coarse-grained...