Seminar Announcement
Dieter KranzlmuellerJohannes Kepler University, Linz - GUP Institute of Graphics & Parallel Processing"Debugging Nondeterministic Parallel Programs"
Date: Friday, March 10, 2006
Abstract:Nondeterminism is a natural phenomenon in parallel and distributed programs due to the unsynchronized execution of independent and communicating threads. While this imposes some nice features for the programmers, it also needs to be treated with care due to unexpected behavior, such as sporadic occurrence of erroneous states. In this context, debugging nondeterministic parallel programs remains a challenge due to behavior such as the irreproducibility effect, the completeness problem or the probe effect. This talk discusses the problems on nondeterministic behavior in message passing codes and introduces solutions as provided by the Monitoring and Debugging environment MAD. At the core of MAD is a record & replay mechanism, which guarantees equivalent program execution during repeated program runs, and an event manipulation technique provided on the basis of a graphical program representation to interfere with the programs execution at nondeterministic choices. On top of these basic building blocks, MAD offers some more advanced features such as process isolation, checkpointing and pattern matching, which extend its sophisticated debugging capabilities.
Email: dk@gup.jku.at Speaker's web page: http://www.gup.uni-linz.ac.at/staff/people.php?staff=dk
Institution web page: http://www.gup.uni-linz.ac.at/index.php 
|