A mechanism for efficient debugging of parallel programs

Abstract

This paper addresses the design and implementation of an integrated debugging system for parallel programs running on shared memory multi-processors (SMMP). We describe the use of flowback analysis to provide information on causal relationships between events in a program's execution without re-executing the program for debugging. We introduce a mechanism called incremental tracing that, by using semantic analyses of the debugged program, makes the flowback analysis practical with only a small amount of trace generated during execution. We extend flowback analysis to apply to parallel programs and describe a method to detect race conditions in the interactions of the co-operating processes.