ACCTEST: Hybrid Testing Approach for OpenACC-Based Programs

In recent years, OpenACC has been used in many supercomputers and attracted many non-computer science specialists for parallelizing their programs in different scientific fields, including weather forecasting and simulations. OpenACC is a high-level programming model that supports parallelism and is easy to learn to use by adding high-level directives without considering too many low-level details. Testing parallel programs is a difficult task, made even harder if using programming models, especially if they have been badly programmed. If so, it will be challenging to detect their runtime errors as well as their causes, whether the error is from the user source code or from the programming model directives. Even when these errors are detected and the source code modified, we cannot guarantee that the errors have been corrected or are still hidden. There are many tools and studies that have investigated several programming models for identifying and detecting related errors. However, OpenACC has not been targeted clearly in any testing tool or previous studies, even though OpenACC has many benefits and features that could lead to increasing use in achieving parallel systems with less effort. In this paper, we enhance ACC_TEST with the ability to test OpenACC-based programs and detect runtime errors by using hybrid-testing techniques that enhance error coverage occurring in OpenACC as well as overheads and testing time.