I am Lechen Yu, a third-year PhD student at Georgia Tech, working with Prof. Vivek Sarkar. My research interests are program analysis and testing for applications in high performance computing (HPC) area. I already accomplished some work related to concurrency bug detection for HPC applications, and now I am exploring opportunities to utilize software testing techniques (e.g. symbolic execution, delta debugging) to find out hidden errors in HPC applications.

With the development of computing architectures and parallel programming models, the complexities of HPC applications are increasing exponentially to fully leverage the underlying hardware parallelism. However, HPC applications also suffer from concurrency bugs such as data race, atomicity violation and deadlock, which are difficult to detect and reproduce. On the other hand, there have been a number of automated software testing tools for desktop, web and mobile applications. These tools can report software errors and deficiencies to programmers, improving the efficiency of software engineering. By applying the methodologies of those tools to HPC applications and revise them based on the features of HPC applications, we can reduce the difficulties of detecting those concurrency bugs mentioned above, helping programmers focus on optimizing the program performance. Since HPC applications play a key role in multiple dicpilines, developing automatic testing tools for them is important and meaningful.

During the conference, I will attend the Technical Paper session and the summer school. I want to learn some start-of-art software testing techniques. I will try to make use of them in my future research projects to develop some useful tools for HPC applications.

I am ready for the conference now. See you guys soon!