How to Do a Million Watchpoints: Efficient Debugging Using Dynamic Instrumentation

Application debugging is a tedious but inevitable chore in any software development project. An effective debugger can make programmers more productive by allowing them to pause execution and inspect the state of the process, or monitor writes to memory to detect data corruption. The latter is a notoriously difficult category of bugs to diagnose and repair especially in pointer-heavy applications. The debugging challenges will increase with the arrival of multicore processors which require explicit parallelization of the user code to get any performance gains. Parallelization in turn can lead to more data debugging issues such as the detection of data races between threads. This paper leverages the increasing efficiency of runtime binary interpreters to provide a new concept of Efficient Debugging using Dynamic Instrumentation, or EDDI. The paper demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of using dynamic instrumentation on demand to accelerate software debuggers, especially when the available hardware support is lacking or inadequate. As an example, EDDI can simultaneously monitor millions of memory locations, without crippling the host processing platform. It does this in software and hence provides a portable debugging environment. It is also well suited for interactive debugging because of the low associated overheads. EDDI provides a scalable and extensible debugging framework that can substantially increase the feature set of standard off the shelf debuggers.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Pd-xml: Extensible markup language for processor description

This paper introduces PD-XML, a meta-language for describing instruction processors in general and with an emphasis on embedded processors, with the specific aim of enabling their rapid prototyping, evaluation and eventual design and implementation. PD-XML is not specific to any one architecture, compiler or simulation environment and hence provides greater flexibility than related machine description methodologies. We demonstrate how PD-XML can be interfaced to existing description methodologies and tool-flows. In particular, we show how PD-XML specifications can be translated into appropriate machine descriptions for the parametric HPL-PD VLIW processor, and for the Flexible Instruction Processor (FIP) approach targeting reconfigurable implementations.

Data Acquisition Mechanical Simulator

Most common form of valvular heart disease Significant mortality & morbidity rates Traditional treatment: MV replacemen