Automated, scalable debugging of MPI programs with Intel® Message Checker

ABSTRACT

The trend towards many-core multi-processor systems and clusters will make systems with tens and hundreds of processors more widely available. Current manual debugging techniques do not scale well to such large systems. Advanced automated debugging tools are needed for standard programming models based on commodity computing, such as threads and MPI. We surveyed MPI users to identify the kinds of MPI errors that they encounter, and classify the errors into several types. We describe how automated tools can detect such errors and present the Intel® Message Checker (IMC) technology being developed at the Intel Advanced Computing Center. IMC's unique technology automatically detects several kinds of MPI errors such as various types of mismatches, race conditions, deadlocks and potential deadlocks, and resource misuse. Finally, we review the usability and uniqueness of IMC and discuss our future plans.

REFERENCES

• 1: Simon Huband , Chris McDonald, A Preliminary Topological Debugger for MPI Programs, Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, p.422, May 15-18, 2001
• 2: Jeffrey S. Vetter , Bronis R. de Supinski, Dynamic software testing of MPI applications with umpire, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (CDROM), p.51-es, November 04-10, 2000, Dallas, Texas, United States
• 3: Bettina Krammer, Matthias S. Müller, Michael M. Resch. MPI I/O Analysis and Error Detection with MARMOT. Proceedings of EuroPVM/MPI 2004, Budapest, Hungary, September 19-22, 2004. Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 3241, pp. 242--250, Springer, 2004.
• 4: Luecke, G., Chen, H., Coyle, J., Hoekstra, J., Kraeva, M., and Zou, Y. MPI-CHECK: a Tool for Checking Fortran 90 MPI Programs. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 2003, vol. 15, pp 93--100.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications
          Subjects: Concurrent, distributed, and parallel languages

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Model checking
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

General Terms:
Languages, Reliability, Verification

Keywords:
MPI, MPI implementation validation, MPI standard checking, automated and scalable debugging, correctness/confidence tools, protocol verification