Runtime MPI Correctness Checking with a Scalable Tools Infrastructure

Increasing computational demand of simulations motivates the use of parallel computing systems. At the same time, this parallelism poses challenges to application developers. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a de-facto standard for distributed memory programming in high performance computing. However, its use also enables complex parallel programing errors such as races, communication errors, and deadlocks. Automatic tools can assist application developers in the detection and removal of such errors. This thesis considers tools that detect such errors during an application run and advances them towards a combination of both precise checks (neither false positives nor false negatives) and scalability. This includes novel hierarchical checks that provide scalability, as well as a formal basis for a distributed deadlock detection approach. At the same time, the development of parallel runtime tools is challenging and time consuming, especially if scalability and portability are key design goals. Current tool development projects often create similar tool components, while component reuse remains low. To provide a perspective towards more efficient tool development, which simplifies scalable implementations, component reuse, and tool integration, this thesis proposes an abstraction for a parallel tools infrastructure along with a prototype implementation. This abstraction overcomes the use of multiple interfaces for different types of tool functionality, which limit flexible component reuse. Thus, this thesis advances runtime error detection tools and uses their redesign and their increased scalability requirements to apply and evaluate a novel tool infrastructure abstraction. The new abstraction ultimately allows developers to focus on their tool functionality, rather than on developing or integrating common tool components. The use of such an abstraction in wide ranges of parallel runtime tool development projects could greatly increase component reuse. Thus, decreasing tool development time and cost. An application study with up to 16,384 application processes demonstrates the applicability of both the proposed runtime correctness concepts and of the proposed tools infrastructure