Event-based Program Analysis with DeWiz

Abstract

Due to the increased complexity of parallel and distributed programs, debugging of them is considered to be the most difficult and time consuming part of the software lifecycle. Tool support is hence a crucial necessity to hide complexity from the user. However, most existing tools seem inadequate as soon as the program under consideration exploits more than a few processors over a long execution time. This problem is addressed by the novel debugging tool DeWiz (Debugging Wizard), whose focus lies on scalability. DeWiz has a modular, scalable architecture, and uses the event graph model as a representation of the investigated program. DeWiz provides a set of modules, which can be combined to generate, analyze, and visualize event graph data. Within this processing pipeline the toolset tries to extract useful information, which is presented to the user at an arbitrary level of abstraction. Additionally, DeWiz is a framework, which can be used to easily implement arbitrary user-defined modules.