Very-Large Scale Code Clone Analysis and Visualization of Open Source Programs Using Distributed CCFinder: D-CCFinder

Abstract

The increasing performance-price ratio of computer hardware makes possible to explore a distributed approach at code clone analysis. This paper presents D-CCFinder, a distributed approach at large-scale code clone analysis. D-CCFinder has been implemented with 80 PC workstations in our student laboratory, and a vast collection of open source software with about 400 million lines in total has been analyzed with it in about 2 days. The result has been visualized as a scatter plot, which showed the presence of frequently used code as easy recognizable patterns. Also, D-CCFinder has been used to analyze a single software system against the whole collection in order to explore the presence of code imported from open source software.