Towards heterogeneous distributed debugging

Several years of research and development in parallel debugger design have given up several techniques, though implemented in a wide range of tools for an equally wide range of systems. This paper is an evaluation of these myriad techniques as applied to the design of a heterogeneous distributed debugger. The evaluation is based on what features users perceive as useful, as well as the ease of implementation of the features using the available technology. A preliminary architecture for such a heterogeneous tool is proposed. Our effort in this paper is significantly different from the other efforts at creating portable and heterogeneous distributed debuggers in that we concentrate on support for all the important issues in parallel debugging, instead of simply concentrating on portability and heterogeneity