HeteroFuzz: fuzz testing to detect platform dependent divergence for heterogeneous applications

Abstract

As specialized hardware accelerators like FPGAs become a prominent part of the current computing landscape, software applications are increasingly constructed to leverage heterogeneous architectures. Such a trend is already happening in the domain of machine learning and Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems built on edge devices. Yet, debugging and testing methods for heterogeneous applications are currently lacking. These applications may look similar to regular C/C++ code but include hardware synthesis details in terms of preprocessor directives. Therefore, their behavior under heterogeneous architectures may diverge significantly from CPU due to hardware synthesis details. Further, the compilation and hardware simulation cycle takes an enormous amount of time, prohibiting frequent invocations required for fuzz testing.