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Reducing the Complexity of Debugging Parallel REPLICA Programs with Pluggable Abstraction Patterns

Jari-Matti Mäkelä, Ville Leppänen, Martti Forsell, Reducing the Complexity of Debugging Parallel REPLICA Programs with Pluggable Abstraction Patterns. In: Tomas Nordström, Zain-ul Abdin (Eds.), Sixth Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing, 1–4, Swedish Multicore Initiative, 2013.

Abstract:

Traditional debuggers focus on a single thread at a time or are better suited
for concurrent programming with a low number of interacting threads and/or
distributed memory, making it hard to monitor a massively data-parallel
program on a shared memory multi-core system.

This work considers a globally step-synchronous model of computation.
Compared to contemporary multi-core processors with
indeterministic thread models, it significantly improves the language's
safety guarantees, the easiness of programming and parallel debugging while also
enabling a more efficient group synchronization. An implementation of
the model is utilized by the REPLICA many-core processor.

The contribution of this work is to introduce a new, modular way of extending
the debugger with pluggable abstraction patterns. Given a language which supports
user defined control abstractions, the library code and its semantics while
debugging can be defined in tandem without modifying the compiler toolchain.
We identify a set of
preliminary parallel programming abstractions relevant to debugging from the
high level language, analyze the mismatch between the intent deducable from
the resulting runtime code and the original source, and suggest ways for
implementing the plugin framework along with a plugin sample for a core
language feature.

BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpMxLeFo13a,
  title = {Reducing the Complexity of Debugging Parallel REPLICA Programs with Pluggable Abstraction Patterns},
  booktitle = {Sixth Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing},
  author = {Mäkelä, Jari-Matti and Leppänen, Ville and Forsell, Martti},
  editor = {Nordström, Tomas and Abdin, Zain-ul},
  publisher = {Swedish Multicore Initiative},
  pages = {1–4},
  year = {2013},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Software Development Laboratory (SwDev)

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