A Visualization-based Environment for Top-down Debugging of Parallel Programs

This paper describes a parallel debugging environment that applies visualizations in a top-down, structured approach for debugging. This environment, referred to as GOLD, uses visualizations in the traditional way for examining a program state, but it also extends the use of visualizations in two directions. First, a technique is described for using visualizations to guide the operation of setting a causal distributed breakpoint for a set of processes. Second, a strategy is introduced for coordinating the use of different types of visualizations when examining a program state. 1 Introduction Visualizations have been shown to be effective tools for facilitating parallel debugging [1, 2]. A shortcoming in using visualizations, however, is that guidelines for applying them in a debugging framework currently do not exist. For example, the ability to set a breakpoint distributed across a set of processes is a useful feature of a parallel debugger, yet guidelines for using visualization to..