A debugger for computational grid applications

The Portable Parallel/Distributed Debugger project at the NASA Ames Research Center has built a debugger for applications running on heterogeneous computational grids. It employs a client-server architecture to simplify the implementation, and its user interface has been designed to provide process control and state examination functions on computations with a large number of processes. The debugger can find processes participating in distributed computations even when those processes were not created under debugger control. In addition to working in a computational grid environment, these techniques also work on other distributed memory jobs, such as those initiated by “mpirun”