GPCloud: Cloud-based Automatic Repair of Real-World Software Bugs

Project Information

Discipline

Computer Science (401) 

Orientation

Research 

Bugs in software are ubiquitous, and fixing them remains an expensive, difficult, time-consuming, and manual process. The GenProg project automatically and generically repairs software defects using genetic programming, an iterative, stochastic search technique. GenProg can repair a variety of error types in many different programs while maintaining important functionality, and notably applies to off-the-shelf legacy applications without requiring formal specifications, program annotations or special coding practices. Our current research focuses on exploiting the search process's inherit parallelism to scale and adapt GenProg to repair bugs in large, open-source programs in commodity cloud environments. This project proposes to extend these improvements, study the evolutionary processes that underlie GenProg's success, and more particularly to understand the relationship between the underlying biological operations, repair success, and program/problem size.

This project will quantify the relationship between program scale, bug type, and test suite size and GP repair success. It will also formalize the GP operators, parameters, and internal representation choices necessary for deployment on commodity cloud resources. This will enable future application to a wider variety of real-world software errors in larger and more variable open-source programs.

Mature software projects are forced to ship with both known and unknown bugs because they lack the development resources to deal with every defect. This is particularly troubling in critical code: in 2006, it took 28 days on average for maintainers to develop fixes for security defects. In a 2008 FBI survey of over 500 large firms, the average annual cost of computer security defects alone was \$289,000. Automatic debugging is thus a pressing research problem, and techniques for addressing this issue must necessarily apply efficiently to real-world bugs in realistic software. We are also committed to providing access to our source code and experimental images to other researchers for the purposes of reproduction and for any research that could use a large benchmark set of real bugs in real software.

Project Contact

Project Lead

Claire Le Goues (clegoues) 

Project Manager

Claire Le Goues (clegoues) 

Project Members

Jonathan Dorn  

Resource Requirements

Hardware System

• Not sure

 

We will use the cloud resources at futuregrid to perform our scale, parameter sweep, and representation-based experiments on a benchmark set of 105 bugs in established open-source projects.

Our experiments entail either the deployment of bursts of a large number of virtual machines that run between 10 minutes to a maximum of 12 hours, though most runs/VMs complete within 1.5 hours on average, or a much smaller group of VMs running for a week at a time.

Project Timeline

Submitted

12/08/2011 - 23:16