The main problems associated with debugging concurrent programs are increased complexity, the "probe effect," nonrepeatability, and the lack of a synchronized global clock. The probe effect refers to the fact that any attempt to observe the behavior of a distributed system may change the behavior of that system. For some parallel programs, different executions with the same data will result in different results even without any attempt to observe the behavior. Even when the behavior can be observed, in many systems the lack of a synchronized global clock makes the results of the observation difficult to interpret. This paper discusses these and other problems related to debugging concurrent programs and presents a survey of current techniques used in debugging concurrent programs. Systems using three general techniques are described: traditional or breakpoint style debuggers, event monitoring systems, and static analysis systems. In addition, techniques for limiting, organizing, and displaying a large amount of data produced by the debugging systems are discussed.

Debugging concurrent programs

To a great extent, the usefulness of a formal model of a software process lies in its ability to accurately predict the behavior of the executing process. Similarly, the usefulness of an executing process lies largely in its ability to fulfill the requirements embodied in a formal model of the process. When process models and process executions diverge, something significant is happening. We have developed techniques for uncovering and measuring the discrepancies between models and executions, which we call process validation. Process validation takes a process execution and a process model, and measures the level of correspondence between the two. Our metrics are tailorable and give process engineers control over determining the severity of different types of discrepancies. The techniques provide detailed information once a high-level measurement indicates the presence of a problem. We have applied our processes validation methods in an industrial case study, of which a portion is described in this article.

Software Process Validation: Quantitatively Measuring the Correspondence of a Process to a Model ; CU-CS-840-97

Monitoring is an essential part of many program development tools, and plays a central role in debugging, optimization, status reporting, and reconfiguration. Traditional monitoring techniques are inadequate when monitoring complex systems such as multiprocessors or distributed systems. A new approach is described in which a historical database forms the conceptual basis for the information processed by the monitor. This approach permits advances in specifying the low-level data collection, specifying the analysis of the collected data, performing the analysis, and displaying the results. Two prototype implementations demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

https://www.cs.arizona.edu/~rts/pubs/TOCS88.pdf

A relational approach to monitoring complex systems

It is suggested that a functional model of monitoring in terms of the generation, processing, dissemination, and presentation of information can help determine the facilities needed to design and construct distributed systems. Implementation issues are also discussed, with attention given to the intrusiveness of monitoring systems and object-based implementation. It is concluded that generic monitoring services are important tools for managing distributed systems and for debugging during system development. Monitoring services may also be needed as part of the application itself, such as in process control and factory automation. >

Monitoring distributed systems

The authors describe a model of real-time distributed computing systems, making the simplifying assumption that the system is dedicated. They present the hardware architecture, operation and implementation of the noninvasive monitoring system which consists of two major components: the interface module and the development module. The interface module can be considered as the front end of the monitoring system. The development module is the host computer for the interface module. The authors describe their approach to monitoring and demonstrate how it can be used to support the testing and debugging of real-time distributed computing systems. Essentially, the monitoring system supports different abstraction levels of monitoring according to application purposes. It can monitor process-level activities (e.g. procedure calls) as well as instruction-level activities (e.g. step-by-step instruction trace). A detailed description of process-level monitoring is given. >

A noninvasive architecture to monitor real-time distributed systems

Event-Driven Monitoring of Distributed Programs.

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Event-Driven Monitoring of Distributed Programs.