Coverity's Static Analysis helps CERN eradicate software flaws

As news of CERN's astonishing discovery of particles travelling faster than light reverberates around the globe, the role of code testing experts in the success of the nuclear research body's pioneering work was highlighted this week.

Coverity, which offers a suite of products to test source code for potentially critical software flaws, announced that it has been working with CERN.

Customer announcements would not normally be the business of Security Watchdog, but this one gives an interesting snapshot into the sheer scale and technological effort undertaken by those involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project.

Scientists at CERN oversee 600 million particle collisions every second designed to discover the secrets of the origins of the universe.

These experiments are conducted in the LHC, which is effectively a huge particle collider, generating around 15PB of data a year, equivalent to 15,000 standard disk drives.

CERN designed the ROOT program to store, analyse and visualise this data, so calling it 'mission critical' probably doesn't do justice to this piece of software's importance.

Enter Coverity's Static Analysis testing tool, which has been designed to find code errors early on in the development cycle when they are easier and cheaper to remove.

"ROOT is used by all 10,000 physicists, so software integrity is a major issue," said Axel Naumann, a member of CERN's ROOT Development Team. "A bug in ROOT can have a significant negative impact on the results of the LHC experiments and physicists' data analyses."

Coverity found over 40,000 defects in the software, which presumably could have severely compromised this costly project as it has been rolled out across all LHC applications, which means a total of 50 million lines of code.

At a very basic level, of course, this case should highlight the importance of rigorous code checking to business customers.

Let's just hope the apparent discovery of a particle travelling faster than light is not the result of a coding error by the CERN team.