A Debugging Engine for a Parallel and Distributed Environment

Abstract. This paper describes a debugging interface that has been developed for a parallel software engineering environment and that was developed on top of the PVM environment in the scope of the SEPP and HPCTI projects of the COPERNICUS Programme. The main goal of this interface is to provide the basic debugging functionalities that are required by somecomponents of that environment. We give special attention to the requirements posed by high-level tools of the environment, and to the need of providing a exible debugging support layer that can be suitably adapted and extended. We present the system logical architecture and the interface speci cation of the debugging engine. We discuss its interfacing with other components of the environment, namely a graphical editor for the GRAPNEL visual parallel programming language, and a testing tool. We nally describe current work on the improvement of the debugging engine