Abstract
A debugger is a crucial part of any programming system, and is especially crucial for those supporting a parallel programming paradigm, like OpenMP. A parallel, relaxed-consistency, distributed shared memory (DSM) system presents unique challenges to a debugger for several reasons: 1) the local copies of a given variable are not always consistent between distributed machines, so directly accessing the variable in the local memory by the debugger won’t always work as expected; 2) if the DSM and debugger both modify page protections, they will likely interfere with each other; and 3) since a large number of SIGSEGVs occur as part of the normal operation of a DSM program, a program error producing a SIGSEGV may be missed. In this paper, we discuss these problems and propose solutions.
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Olivier, J., Chen, CP., Hoeflinger, J. (2006). Debugging Distributed Shared Memory Applications. In: Guo, M., Yang, L.T., Di Martino, B., Zima, H.P., Dongarra, J., Tang, F. (eds) Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications. ISPA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4330. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11946441_75
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11946441_75
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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