Improving Test Data Generation for MPI Program Path Coverage With FERPSO-IMPR and Surrogate-Assisted Models

Message passing interface (MPI) is a powerful tool for parallel computing, originally designed for high-performance computing on massively parallel computers. In this paper, we combine FERPSO-IMPR (fitness Euclidean distance ratio particle swarm optimizer with information migration-based penalty and population reshaping) and surrogate-assisted models to generate test cases for MPI program path coverage testing. In our proposed method, FERPSO-IMPR employs a dual population strategy to initialize data and calculate fitness. Then, we create a sample set based on the initial data and its fitness. Subsequently, we train the master-slave surrogate models to predict individual fitness. Finally, a small number of elite individuals are selected to execute the program to decide whether to generate the required test data and guide the subsequent evolution process. We apply the proposed method to seven MPI programs and perform experimental comparisons from five directions. Experimental results show that compared with the comparative method, the time consumption of the proposed method is reduced by 33.2%, the number of evaluations is reduced by 38.8%, and the success rate is increased by 7.6%. These results prove that our method can effectively reduce the test data generation cost of MPI programs.