Distributed Debugging An Integrated Approach

The design and development of digital computer software for distributed concurrent programming environments has increased significantly in the past few years. The presence of remote processors and concurrency greatly complicates the creation, analysis, testing, and debugging of all software produced for these environments. It appears that few tools developed for sequential environments are adequate for debugging software programs in a distributed concurrent environment. The distributed concurrent environment also presents the need for special debugging tools that were not needed for sequential environments. This research will present a new model for debugging programs in a distributed concurrent programming environment. This new model was used to design, develop, and implement an integrated, cooperating set of concurrent debugging tools. The new debugging model and tool set were used in a distributed Concurrent C development environment running under the UNIX® operating system and connected by an Ethernet local area network. Actual results obtained from using the new debugging scheme and integrated debugging tool set to detect, locate, and correct software faults in distributed Concurrent C programs are also presented.

The book is divided into two parts, the first one covering the concepts and methodologies, and the second describing the tools and integrated environments that were developed in those projects. In this way, we hope that the reader will find the book useful not only concerning an identification of current trends in parallel program development, but also concerning their practical illustration through concrete tools and environments.

This set of technical books contains all the information presented at the 1995 International Conference on Parallel Processing. This conference, held August 14 - 18, featured over 100 lectures from more than 300 contributors, and included three panel sessions and three keynote addresses. The international authorship includes experts from around the globe, from Texas to Tokyo, from Leiden to London. Compiled by faculty at the University of Illinois and sponsored by Penn State University, these Proceedings are a comprehensive look at all that's new in the field of parallel processing.

LNCS volumes 2073 and 2074 contain the proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2001, held in San Francisco, California, May 27-31, 2001. The two volumes consist of more than 230 contributed and invited papers that reflect the aims of the conference to bring together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, researchers from various application areas who are pioneering advanced application of computational methods to sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering, arts and humanitarian fields, along with software developers and vendors, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research, as well as to help industrial users apply various advanced computational techniques.

Parallel and distributed computing are becoming increasingly important as cost-effective ways to achieve high computational performance. Symbolic computations are notable for their use of irregular data structures and hence parallel symbolic computing has its own distinctive set of technical challenges. The papers in this book are based on presentations made at a workshop at MIT in October 1992. They present results in a wide range of areas including: speculative computation, scheduling techniques, program development tools and environments, programming languages and systems, models of concurrency and distribution, parallel computer architecture, and symbolic applications.

Ludwig (Institut fur Informatik, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg, Germany) and Miller (computer science, U. of Wisconsin, US) present five papers examining the construction and methodology of tools for debugging and performance analysis in parallel programs. After a review of the past decade's work in debuggers and performance analyzers, papers look a tool infrastructure, an operational tool environment for multi-thread and multi-process debugging and execution visualization, multi-execution performance tuning, and the specification of performance properties of parallel applications using compound events. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Distributed Computer Systems: Theory and Practice is a collection of papers dealing with the design and implementation of operating systems, including distributed systems, such as the amoeba system, argus, Andrew, and grapevine. One paper discusses the concepts and notations for concurrent programming, particularly language notation used in computer programming, synchronization methods, and also compares three classes of languages. Another paper explains load balancing or load redistribution to improve system performance, namely, static balancing and adaptive load balancing. For program efficiency, the user can choose from various debugging approaches to locate or fix errors without significantly disturbing the program behavior. Examples of debuggers pertain to the ada language and the occam programming language. Another paper describes the architecture of a real-time distributed database system used for computer network management, monitoring integration, as well as administration and control of both local area or wide area communications networks. The book can prove helpful to programmers, computer engineers, computer technicians, and computer instructors dealing with many aspects of computers, such as programming, hardware interface, networking, engineering or design.