article

Free access

High-level debugging in parasight

Authors:

Ilya GertnerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 24, Issue 1

Pages 151 - 162

https://doi.org/10.1145/69215.69230

Published: 01 November 1988 Publication History

Abstract

Debugging parallel programs with time critical dependencies is difficult due to subtle race conditions that may cause deadlock, starvation, and other errors. These errors can be detected by multiple instrumentation points triggered by logical assertions. Although some advanced debuggers provide a programmer with the ability to define complex logical assertions, they are inadequate for debugging parallel programs due to the high overhead of monitoring these assertions.

This paper describes the facilities for high-level debugging in Parasight™ a parallel programming environment. In Parasight, high-level debugging facilities are implemented as separate programs that are linked dynamically to a target program. The target program is controlled by attaching these debugging programs to light-weight instrumentation points that are dynamically inserted and deleted. Different facilities of arbitrary complexity may be created to support high-level debugging. Parasight has been implemented on Multimax™ a shared-memory multiprocessor. It has been used for debugging and profiling “C” programs.

References

[1]

AT&T UN/X System V Support Tools Guide. Chapter 8. COFF- The Common Object File Format.

[2]

Aral Z., Gertner I., "Non-Intrusive and Interactive Profiling in Parasight", Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Parallel Programming, New Haven, Connecticut, July 1988.

Digital Library

[3]

Adams E., Muchnick S., "Dbxtools: A Window-Based Symbolic Debugger for Sun Workstations", Software-Practice and Experience, July 1986.

Digital Library

[4]

Bell C.G., "Multi: A New Class of Multiprocessor Computers", Science, Vol. 228, April, 1985.

[5]

Encore Computer Corporation, "CDB User's Manual", Marlborough, MA 1752-3004.

[6]

Doeppner T.W., "Threads - A System for the Support of Concurrent Programming", Computer Science Technical Report CS-87-11, Brown University, June, 1987.

[7]

VAX/VMS Source-level Debugger, Reference Manual, Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, MA 01652

[8]

Encore Computer Corporation., "UMAX 4.2 Programmer's Reference Manual", Marlborough,MA 01752-3004.

[9]

Feldman S.I., "Make- a Program for Managing Computer Programs", Software-Practice and Experience, 1977.

[10]

Graham S.L., Kessler P.B, and McKusick M.K., "Gprof, a Call Graph Execution of Profiler," Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '82 Symposium on Compiler Construction, SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 17, No. 6, June, 1982.

Digital Library

[11]

LeBlanc T.J., and Mellor-Crummey J.M., "Debugging Parallel Programs with Instant Reply,"IEEE Transactions of Computers, C-36,No.4,April,1987.

Digital Library

[12]

Karp A., "Programming for Parallelism," IEEE Computer, May, 1987.

Digital Library

[13]

McKusick M.K., K~els M.J., and Bloom J.M. (editors), "UNIX Programmers' Manual, 4.3 Berkley Software Distribution," University of California, Berkley, April 1986.

[14]

Nassi I.R, "A Preliminary Report on the Ultramax: A Massively Parallel Shared Memory Multiprocessor", DARPA Workshop on Parallel Architectures for Mathematical and Scientific Computing, July 1, 1987.

[15]

Rashid F.R., "Threads of a New System", UNIX Review, August, 1986.

[16]

Reiss S., "Working in the Garden Environment for Conceptual Programming", IEEE Software, Nov.,1987.

Digital Library

[17]

Segall Z. and Gregoretti F. "Programming for Observability Support in a Parallel Programming Environment", Tech. Report CMU-CS-85-176, Department of Computer Science, CMU, November, 1985.

[18]

Segall Z. Rudolph L. "Pie: A Programming and Instrumentation Environment for Parallel Processing", IEEE Software, November, 1985.

Digital Library

[19]

Wilson D., "ParaUelization of Event Driven Simulator on the Encore Multimax",Encore ETR-No. 886-005.

Cited By

Marceau GCooper GSpiro JKrishnamurthi SReiss S(2007)The design and implementation of a dataflow language for scriptable debuggingAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-006-0003-z14:1(59-86)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-006-0003-z
Knoop JRüthing OSteffen B(2004)Lazy code motionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943939:4(460-472)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989439
Lam MWolf M(2004)A data locality optimizing algorithmACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943739:4(442-459)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989437
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

High-level debugging in parasight
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Parallel architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

Recommendations

High-level debugging in parasight
PADD '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGPLAN and SIGOPS workshop on Parallel and distributed debugging

Debugging parallel programs with time critical dependencies is difficult due to subtle race conditions that may cause deadlock, starvation, and other errors. These errors can be detected by multiple instrumentation points triggered by logical ...
Parasight: a high-level debugger/profiler architecture for shared-memory multiprocessor
ICS '88: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Supercomputing

Existing debuggers and profilers are inadequate for debugging and profiling parallel programs. They are awkward in their handling of multiple threads of control and highly intrusive in their monitoring of program behavior. Parasight^TM is an architecture ...
The high-level debugging of parallelized code using code liberation

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 24, Issue 1

Special issue: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGPLAN and SIGOPS workshop on parallel and distributed debugging

Jan. 1989

280 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/69215

Editor:
Richard L. Wexelblat

Issue’s Table of Contents

PADD '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGPLAN and SIGOPS workshop on Parallel and distributed debugging
November 1988
282 pages
ISBN:0897912969
DOI:10.1145/68210
Editor:
Richard L. Wexelbalt

Copyright © 1988 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 1988

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 24, Issue 1

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

31
Total Citations
View Citations
411
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)55
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 10 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Marceau GCooper GSpiro JKrishnamurthi SReiss S(2007)The design and implementation of a dataflow language for scriptable debuggingAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-006-0003-z14:1(59-86)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-006-0003-z
Knoop JRüthing OSteffen B(2004)Lazy code motionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943939:4(460-472)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989439
Lam MWolf M(2004)A data locality optimizing algorithmACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943739:4(442-459)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989437
Wall D(2004)Predicting program behavior using real or estimated profilesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943639:4(429-441)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989436
Cartwright RFagan M(2004)Soft typingACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943539:4(412-428)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989435
Kessler P(2004)Fast breakpointsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943239:4(390-397)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989432
Steele GWhite J(2004)How to print floating-point numbers accuratelyACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/989393.98943139:4(372-389)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/989393.989431
Vetter Jde Supinski BTurcotte L(2000)Dynamic software testing of MPI applications with umpireProceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing10.5555/370049.370462(51-es)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2000
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/370049.370462
Vetter Jde Supinski B(2000)Dynamic Software Testing of MPI Applications with UmpireACM/IEEE SC 2000 Conference (SC'00)10.1109/SC.2000.10055(51-51)Online publication date: 2000
https://doi.org/10.1109/SC.2000.10055
Shende SCuny JHansen LKundu JMcLaughry SWolf OFrancioni JReed D(1996)Event and state-based debugging in TAUProceedings of the SIGMETRICS symposium on Parallel and distributed tools10.1145/238020.238030(21-30)Online publication date: 1-Jan-1996
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/238020.238030
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents