Software verification in the Google app-engine cloud

Abstract

Software verification often requires a large amount of computing resources. In the last years, cloud services emerged as an inexpensive, flexible, and energy-efficient source of computing power. We have investigated if such cloud resources can be used effectively for verification. We chose the platform-as-a-service offer Google App Engine and ported the open-source verification framework CPAchecker to it. We provide our new verification service as a web front-end to users who wish to solve single verification tasks (tutorial usage), and an API for integrating the service into existing verification infrastructures (massively parallel bulk usage). We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of this service and show that it can be successfully used to offload verification work to the cloud, considerably sparing local verification resources. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.