Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) suffers from the path explosion problem when the target program has many conditional branches. The classical approach for managing the path explosion problem is dynamic state merging. Dynamic state merging combines similar symbolic program states to avoid the exponential growth in the number of states during DSE. However, state merging still requires solver invocations at each program branch, even when both paths of the branch are feasible. Moreover, the best path search strategy for DSE may not create the best state merging opportunities. Some drawbacks of state merging can be mitigated by compile-time state merging (i.e., branch elimination by converting control-flow into dataflow). In this paper, we propose a non-semantics-preserving but failure-preserving compiler transformation for removing expensive symbolic branches in a program to improve the scalability of DSE. We have developed a framework for detecting spurious bugs that our transformation can insert. Finally, we show that our transformation can significantly improve the performance of DSE on various benchmark programs and help improve the performance of coverage and bug discovery of large real-world programs.

The n-body problem involves calculating the effect of bodies on each other. n-body simulations are ubiquitous in the fields of physics and astronomy and notoriously computationally expensive. The naïve algorithm for n-body simulations has the prohibiting O(n2) time complexity. Reducing the time complexity to O(n · lg(n)), the tree-based Barnes-Hut algorithm approximates the effect of bodies beyond a certain threshold distance. Other than algorithmic improvements, extensive research has gone into accelerating n-body simulations on GPUs and multi-core systems. However, Barnes-Hut is a tree-traversal algorithm, which makes it a poor target for acceleration using traditional GPU shader cores. In contrast, recent work shows that, for tree-based computations, GPU ray-tracing (RT) cores dominate shader cores. In this work, we reformulate the Barnes-Hut algorithm as a ray-tracing problem and implement it with NVIDIA OptiX. Our evaluation shows that the resulting system, RT-BarnesHut, outperforms current state-of-the-art GPU-based implementations.