Using the GPGPU for scaling up Mining Software Repositories

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field integrates and analyzes data stored in repositories such as source control and bug repositories to support practitioners. Given the abundance of repository data, scaling up MSR analyses has become a major challenge. Recently, researchers have experimented with conventional techniques like a supercomputer or cloud computing, but these are either too expensive or too hard to configure. This paper proposes to scale up MSR analysis using “general-purpose computing on graphics processing units” (GPGPU) on off-the-shelf video cards. In a representative MSR case study to measure co-change on version history of the Eclipse project, we find that the GPU approach is up to a factor of 43.9 faster than a CPU-only approach.