High-level debugging of distributed systems: The behavioral abstraction approach

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Abstract

Most extant debugging aids force their users to think about errors in programs from a low-level, unit-at-a-time perspective. Such a perspective is inadequate for debugging large complex systems, particularly distributed systems. In this paper, we present a high-level approach to debugging that offers an alternative to the traditional techniques. We describe a language, edl, developed to support this high-level approach to debugging and outline a set of tools that has been constructed to effect this approach. The paper includes an example illustrating the approach and discusses a number of problems encountered while developing these debugging tools.

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Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant MCS-8006327 and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD), monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract NR049-041.

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Supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant NAG1-115.

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