CSR: Medium: Guanyin: a Thousand hands with a Thousand eyes for Distributed Software Checking

软件可靠性几乎影响到每个人。彻底的软件检查无疑是提高软件可靠性的关键，但大多数现有技术的检查覆盖率受到它们应用位置的严重阻碍：软件产品通常只在其开发的站点进行检查，因此检查的不同状态的数量受到这些站点的资源(例如，机器、测试人员/用户、软件/硬件配置)的限制。为了解决这个根本问题，我们将调查使软件供应商能够在产品部署后继续检查错误的机制，从而检查更多样化的状态集。我们的研究贡献将包括调查、开发和部署：(1)广域自主软件检查基础设施，以透明、高效和可扩展的方式支持对已部署软件的持续检查；(2)简单但通用和强大的检查界面，以促进创建新的检查技术，并将现有技术结合到更强大的手段中，以发现在常规部署前测试中经常找不到的细微错误；(3)轻量级隔离、检查点、迁移和确定性重放机制，其允许将应用进程复制为检查启动点、将副本与用户隔离、跨主机迁移副本、以及重放已识别的错误，而不需要原始执行环境；以及(4)分布式计算机制，用于高效且可扩展地利用地理上分散的空闲资源来确定应在何处以及何时执行副本，以提高软件检查的速度和覆盖范围，从而将可用硬件周期转换为改进的软件可靠性。

Software reliability affects virtually everyone. Thorough software checking is unquestionably crucial to improve software reliability, but the checking coverage of most existing techniques is severely hampered by where they are applied: a software product is typically checked only at the site where it is developed, thus the number of different states checked is throttled by those sites' resources (e.g., machines, testers/users, software/hardware configurations).To address this fundamental problem, we will investigate mechanisms that will enable software vendors to continue checking for bugs after a product is deployed, thus checking a drastically more diverse set of states. Our research contributions will include the investigation, development, and deployment of: (1) a wide-area autonomic software checking infrastructure to support continuous checking of deployed software in a transparent, efficient, and scalable manner; (2) a simple yet general and powerful checking interface to facilitate creation of new checking techniques and combination of existing techniques into more powerful means to find subtle bugs that are often not found during conventional pre-deployment testing; (3) lightweight isolation, checkpoint, migration, and deterministic replay mechanisms that enable replication of application processes as checking launch points, isolation of replicas from users, migration of replicas across hosts, and replay of identified bugs without need for the original execution environment; and (4) distributed computing mechanisms for efficiently and scalably leveraging geographically dispersed idle resources to determine where and when replicas should be executed to improve the speed and coverage of software checking, thereby converting available hardware cycles into improved software reliability.