A framework for dynamic program analyzers

Abstract

BEE++ is an object-oriented application framework for the dynamic analysis of distributed programs. The main objective of BEE++ is to provide a common platform for monitoring and debugging. BEE++'s class library consists of a rich set of classes for event processing to support a variety of visualization, monitoring and debugging needs. It also provides for customizability of event processing through inheritance. Users can derive customized graphical debugging and visualization systems from a set of base classes. BEE++'s other design goals are the support of dynamic program analysis for distributed heterogenous target applications at runtime with predictable overhead. The design is based a symmetric peer-peer architecture, including the ability to dynamically configure target appli cations and monitoring tools. The dynamic analysis tools can be distributed across nodes, which provides significant performance gains for visualization applications. in addition, the framework can be instantiated for a variety of communication protocols.A TCP/IP based instance of the framework has been ported to several machine architectures including Sun, Vax and Cray-YMP. BEE++ is based on BEE[10], a portable platform for monitoring implemented in C but has been completely reengineered in C++ using the object-oriented design methodology OMT. Performance measurements indicate that the runtime overhead of the object-oriented version is not significant when compared with the C version.