Pervasive debugging

Introduction

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

People

Steven Hand	Tim Harris	Alex Ho	Rashid Mehmood