The MPI Bugs Initiative: a Framework for MPI Verification Tools Evaluation

Ensuring the correctness of MPI programs becomes as challenging and important as achieving the best performance. Many tools have been proposed in the literature to detect incorrect usages of MPI in a given program. However, the limited set of code samples each tool provides and the lack of metadata stating the intent of each test make it difficult to assess the strengths and limitations of these tools. In this paper, we present the MPI Bugs Initiative, a complete collection of MPI codes to assess the status of MPI verification tools. We introduce a classification of MPI errors and provide correct and incorrect codes covering many MPI features and our categorization of errors. The resulting suite comprises 1,668 codes, each coming with a well-formatted header that clarifies the intent of each code and specifies how to execute and evaluate it. We evaluated the completeness of the MPI Bugs Initiative against eight state-of-the-art MPI verification tools.