Research Initiation Award: Adaptive Tracing for Optimal Parallel and Sequential Program Debugging

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Adaptive strategies for the optimal trace-and-replay debugging of parallel and sequential programs will be developed. As parallel machines become larger and processors become faster, the increasing tracing bottleneck is preventing the development of sophisticated trace-based tools necessary for debugging. Our objectives to alleviate this problem are twofold. First, we will explore the theoretical lower bounds on what must be traced to provide execution replay. We will investigate which messages, shared-memory references, or local variable accesses need be traced to replay any part of the execution in a bounded amount of time. By bounding replay time, we provide a fixed response time to debugging queries, even for large-scale or long-running programs. Second, we will develop optimal or near-optimal strategies that adapt to the execution being debugged. Our algorithms make run-time tracing decisions to adapt to what the execution will be doing next, and keep traces optimally small. ***