We present a novel approach to form a general framework for distributed fault simulation and test generation. We implement a general purpose "engine" for data-parallel distributed computing using PVM. This engine acts as the core of the framework. HITEC/PROOFS, an existing fault simulation and test generation package, is plugged into the engine and together they form a distributed fault simulation and test generation framework. Our experimental results on the VIPER microprocessor demonstrate that this approach leads to considerable speed-up compared to running the package on a single computer. This approach is convenient to use since most of the work to achieve parallelization is transparent to the user. We then generalize our approach with proposals to apply the same principle to other applications.
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