[Beowulf] Re: [Dulug] Parallel debuggers (fwd)

[Mark Hahn]

>> What is the current state of the art for MPI (or PVM or other parallel
>> code) debuggers?

I think both Totalview and Allinea's DDT are the current state of the market.
the state of the art is probably less practical ;)
I do occasionally hear about academic efforts (TAO and something using
Eclipse).

> I vaguely recall some review articles on this on CWM
>> and/or CM, and of course there has been list discussion in the past, but

what are CWM and CM?

> sarcastic, but true. Part of this is because there's too much
> information to look at using a regular debugger except for the most

DDT is based on a parallel-aware GUI that uses GDB for it's low-level,
per-rank manipulations.  I think it's a good design - it certainly 
tries to provide the user with a lot of leverage across many-way 
parallel jobs.

> counts (making one window per process impossible), and the third is
> that, being remote, the fancy gui based debuggers run like a ruptured
> turtle over the internet.

I've run DDT a few times from home (cablemodem, asymmetric bandwidth,
~15ms rtt, ssh -YC) and it seemed OK.

regards, mark hahn