On correcting the intrusion of tracing non-deterministic programs by software

Abstract

This paper describes a performance evaluation technique of parallel programs based on software tracing. The interest of the proposed method is to enable post-mortem correction of the intrusion of software tracing of non deterministic programs (probe effect), by use of RECORD-REPLAY debugging techniques. In the first phase (RECORD), a primary trace is collected with a very low perturbation. This primary trace is used to force deterministic re-executions of parallel programs during subsequent replayed phases. The method proposed in the paper takes the initial RECORD execution as a reference and collects performance traces during a replayed execution. The dates of performance traces are then corrected post mortem in order to compensate the intrusion caused by the performance tracing and by the deterministic re-execution mechanism.