Debugging distributed applications using a coordination architecture

Abstract

Most distributed systems consist of a number of sequential processes running in parallel. We present a language-independent debugging framework for the debugging of these distributed systems. Over the years, a lot of effort has been invested in the construction of debuggers for sequential programs. The majority of these debuggers work by abstracting the behaviour of the program being debugged into events, and visualizing these events. We utilize these sequential debuggers to generate language-independent debugging events about the sequential execution of the processes in the distributed system. The underlying coordination architecture is used to generate debugging events dealing with the interaction between processes. These sequential and process interaction related debugging events are then processed by a separate distributed system that implements the high-level language-independent debugging functionality. We also present a powerful multilingual distributed debugger based on our framework.