Efficient large-scale heterogeneous debugging using dynamic tracing

Heterogeneous multi-core and many-core processors are increasingly common in personal computers and industrial systems. Efficient software development on these platforms needs suitable debugging tools, beyond traditional interactive debuggers. An alternative, to interactively follow the execution flow of a program, is tracing within the debugging environment, as long as the tracer has a minimal overhead. In this paper, the dynamic tracing infrastructure of GNU debugger (GDB) was investigated to understand its performance limitations. Thereafter, we propose an improved architecture for dynamic tracing on many-core processors within GDB, and demonstrate its scalability on highly parallel platforms. In addition, the scalability of the thread data collection and presentation component was studied and new views were proposed within the Eclipse Debugging Service Framework and the Trace Compass visualization tool. With these scalability enhancements, debuggers such as GDB can more efficiently help debugging multi-threaded programs on heterogeneous many-core processors composed of multi-core CPUs, and GPUs containing thousands of cores

Inviwo -- A Visualization System with Usage Abstraction Levels

The complexity of today's visualization applications demands specific visualization systems tailored for the development of these applications. Frequently, such systems utilize levels of abstraction to improve the application development process, for instance by providing a data flow network editor. Unfortunately, these abstractions result in several issues, which need to be circumvented through an abstraction-centered system design. Often, a high level of abstraction hides low level details, which makes it difficult to directly access the underlying computing platform, which would be important to achieve an optimal performance. Therefore, we propose a layer structure developed for modern and sustainable visualization systems allowing developers to interact with all contained abstraction levels. We refer to this interaction capabilities as usage abstraction levels, since we target application developers with various levels of experience. We formulate the requirements for such a system, derive the desired architecture, and present how the concepts have been exemplary realized within the Inviwo visualization system. Furthermore, we address several specific challenges that arise during the realization of such a layered architecture, such as communication between different computing platforms, performance centered encapsulation, as well as layer-independent development by supporting cross layer documentation and debugging capabilities

A Monitoring Language for Run Time and Post-Mortem Behavior Analysis and Visualization

UFO is a new implementation of FORMAN, a declarative monitoring language, in which rules are compiled into execution monitors that run on a virtual machine supported by the Alamo monitor architecture.Comment: In M. Ronsse, K. De Bosschere (eds), proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Automated Debugging (AADEBUG 2003), September 2003, Ghent. cs.SE/030902

A File System Abstraction for Sense and Respond Systems

The heterogeneity and resource constraints of sense-and-respond systems pose significant challenges to system and application development. In this paper, we present a flexible, intuitive file system abstraction for organizing and managing sense-and-respond systems based on the Plan 9 design principles. A key feature of this abstraction is the ability to support multiple views of the system via filesystem namespaces. Constructed logical views present an application-specific representation of the network, thus enabling high-level programming of the network. Concurrently, structural views of the network enable resource-efficient planning and execution of tasks. We present and motivate the design using several examples, outline research challenges and our research plan to address them, and describe the current state of implementation.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures Workshop on End-to-End, Sense-and-Respond Systems, Applications, and Services In conjunction with MobiSys '0