Visualization of message races in MPI parallel programs

Abstract

As parallel programs become larger and more complex, it is harder to understand and debug parallel programs. If those programs have race conditions, intended or otherwise, it is more difficult to understand and debug. Visualization is widely accepted as a powerful technique to understand and manage the complexity of parallel programs as well as to detect race conditions. This paper presents a new visualization tool for debugging race conditions in message-passing programs. Our visualization aims to provide effective and useful visualization for programmers to understand complex phenomena such as the interaction of concurrent processes, to handle enormous visual information, and to debug message races in MPI parallel programs. ? 2007 IEEE.