A visualization-based environment for top-down debugging of parallel programs

This paper describes a parallel debugging environment that applies visualizations in a top-down, struc-tured approach for debugging. This environment, referred to as GOLD, uses visualizations in the traditional way for examining a program state, but it also extends the use of visualizations in two directions. First, a technique is described for using visualizations to guide the operation of setting a causal distributed breakpoint for a set of processes. Second, a strategy is introduced for coordinating the use of diierent types of visualizations when examining a program state.