Towards Debugging and Analysis Tools for Kilo-Processor Computers

Abstract

The new class of MIMD computers with a thousand or more processors (kilo-processor machines) is over-reaching the available program development support tools. One such machine is the Fujitsu ap1000. The LERP project at the Australian National University aims to assist the ap1000 programmer with essential monitoring and debugging tools. LERP is based on off-line analysis and replay of an event trace which includes both low level system events and user-defined events. In this paper we address the issues of extracting humanly usable information from large event traces with a new compound event analysis tool, suited to machines of the ap1000 scale. Keywords: debugging, compound events, kilo-processors, event trace analysis 1 Introduction The Fujitsu ap1000 is a pioneering member of a class of MIMD wormhole message-passing machines with many hundreds of processors (each of which is a general purpose microprocessor with significant speed and memory in its own right), connected by three comm..