ePubs

The open archive for STFC research publications

Full Record Details

DOI 10.5286/dltr.2015001
Persistent URL http://purl.org/net/epubs/work/12331834
Record Status Checked
Record Id 12331834
Title Comparative debugging using TotalView scripting
Contributors
Abstract Comparative debugging makes use of direct comparisons between two different runs of the same or similar programs to diagnose unexpected and often erroneous behaviour in the application or applications. Comparative debugging is an important technique for STFC and for computational scientists at other labs around the world. As a six month project at STFC, in collaboration with Rogue Wave Software Inc., an automated comparative debugging script (CDTV) has been created that makes use of the command interface of RogueWave’s TotalView debugger. To demonstrate this script, example scenarios are shown and discussed within the report, highlighting the key features, current limitations and possible improvements that could guide any future work. The CDTV script has been shown to be capable of locating differences caused by an artificial bug introduces into a serial program written in C or in Fortran as well as parallel programs using MPI and OpenMP. As well as simple test codes, the script has been demonstrated using a real application, the UK Turbulence Consortium’s Shock/Boundary Layer Interaction code. We believe that similar large scale applications could benefit from comparative debugging without making major changes to the underlying CDTV script.
Organisation STFC , SCI-COMP , SCI-COMP-APE
Keywords comparative debugging , CCP , debugging
Funding Information
Related Research Object(s):
Licence Information: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
Language English (EN)
Type Details URI(s) Local file(s) Year
Report DL Technical Reports DL-TR-2015-001. 2015. DLTR-2015-001.pdf 2015