A bibliography of parallel debuggers, 1990 edition
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
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Traditional debuggers, designed to examine single process serial programs, do not provide sufficient functionality for efficient debugging of distributed programs. There are a number of fundamental differences in the way in which a programmer understands the execution of a distributed program, and a debugger must present data to its user in light of that fact. MAM, A Message Abstraction Monitor, is described here. MAM provides a user with software tools needed to utilize a novel technique for debugging of distributed programs. MAM permits a user to define high level abstractions on a stream of messages transpiring between processes of a distributed program, using a Message Abstraction Language (MAL). MAM analyzes a post-mortem journal of such messages, attempting to impose user defined structures on them. The user may then view the analyzed journal in a sequential manner, with a graphical display indicating the relationships of various messages with respect to higher level abstractions and to processes of the distributed program. MAM also provides "near-miss" detection allowing intelligent guesses to be made, for matches in an error-laden journal. This near-miss facility results in automatic detection of some programming errors. The contributions of this research are a mechanism for the specification of correct abstract communications, the use of this in "near-miss" recognition, and the "play-back" nature of the presentation of this information for debugging purposes.