Design of a communication modeling tool for debugging parallel programs

© 1990 IEEE. This paper describes a system tool designed for debugging the interprocess communication of a imssagepassing parallel program. The tool includes an nteractive environment that helps the user generate a graphical display of the program-in-question\u27s epected communication behavior. This graph is consicered to be the program\u27s communication model. The debugging tool then runs the real program and compres the aforementioned model to the program\u27s actucd communication behavior determined at run time The results of the comparison are displayed via a graphical animation that is based on the model-grapi. The debugging tool provides the user with a mechar ism for directing a debugging session based on the user s mental abstractions of a program\u27s communication structure. Additionally, the communication model can be designed for any level of the program allowng the user to debug the program in a top-down fashion