The parallel debugging architecture in the Intel® Debugger

Abstract

In addition to being a quality symbolic debugger for serial IA32 and IPF Linux applications written in C, C++, and Fortran, the Intel® Debugger is also capable of debugging parallel applications of Pthreads, OpenMP, and MPI. When debugging a MPI application, the Intel® Debugger achieves better startup time and user response time than conventional parallel debuggers by (1) setting up a tree-like debugger network, which has a higher degree of parallelism and scalability than a flat network, and (2) employing a message aggregation mechanism to reduce the amount of data flowing in the network. This parallel debugging architecture can be further enhanced to support the debugging of mixed-mode and heterogeneous parallel applications. Moreover, a generalized version of this architecture can be applied in areas other than debugging, such as performance profiling of parallel applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.