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Pervasive debugging
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Pervasive debugging

Introduction

An introduction to the work is available as a poster we presented at the EPSRC e-Science workshop.

Developers of e-Science software face a particularly harsh programming environment. Systems are built from heterogeneous collections of machines, connected over wide-area network links and often maintained under separate management. If this complexity is to be invisible at the point of use by programmers then support is needed for the complete software development cycle, including compilation, debugging and profiling in addition to job control and run-time middleware.

In this project we are investigating techniques for software debugging. We focus on two areas which have received little attention from the Computer Science community. The first area is controlling complex multi-process applications through a single cohesive debugging interface. We can do this by virtualizing the resources used by the system, thereby allowing the threads that it involves and the network links that it uses to be modelled as a single controllable entity. This method will be applicable for moderately sized systems of perhaps half a dozen nodes.

The second area is post-deployment debugging of very large-scale distributed applications -- for instance those running over hundreds or thousands of nodes. In such a setting traditional distributed debugging techniques of checkpointing or simulation become infeasible.

This work is supported by the EPSRC grant Pervasive debugging and by an Eclipse Innovation Grant from IBM.

Publications

Dependable computing needs pervasive debugging
Tim Harris
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGOPS European Workshop
[gzipped postscript]

Pervasive Debugging
Alex Ho
8th CaberNet Radicals Workshop
Ajaccio, Corsica, October 2003
poster: [pdf]

People


 
Steven Hand
Tim Harris
Alex Ho
Rashid Mehmood