OUTRIDER: Optimizing the mUtation Testing pRocess In Distributed EnviRonments

The adoption of commodity clusters has been widely extended due to its cost-effectiveness and the evolution of networks. These systems can be used to reduce the long execution time of applications that require a vast amount of computational resources, and especially of those techniques that are usually deployed in centralized environments, like testing. Currently, one of the main challenges in testing is to obtain an appropriate test suite. Mutation testing is a widely used technique aimed at generating high quality test suites. However, the execution of this technique requires a high computational cost.In this work we propose OUTRIDER, an HPC-based optimization that contributes to bridging the gap between the high computational cost of mutation testing and the parallel infrastructures of HPC systems aimed to speed-up the execution of computational applications. This optimization is based on our previous work called EMINENT, an algorithm focused on parallelizing the mutation testing process using MPI. However, since EMINENT does not efficiently exploit the computational resources in HPC systems, we propose 4 strategies to alleviate this issue. A thorough experimental study using different applications shows an increase of up to 70% performance improvement using these optimizations.