MPI-semantic memory checking tools for parallel applications

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a language-independent application interface that provides a standard for communication among the processes of programs running on parallel computers, clusters or heterogeneous networks. However, writing correct and portable MPI applications is di cult: inconsistent or incorrect use of parameters may occur; the subtle semantic di erences of various MPI calls may be used inconsistently or incorrectly even by expert programmers. The MPI implementations typically implement only minimal sanity checks to achieve the highest possible performance. Although many interactive debuggers have been developed or extended to handle the concurrent processes of MPI applications, there are still numerous classes of bugs which are hard or even impossible to nd with a conventional debugger. There are many cases of memory con icts or errors, for example, overlapping access or segmentation fault, does not provide enough and useful information for programmer to solve the problem. That is even worse for MPI applications, due to the exibility and high-frequency of using memory parallel in MPI standard, which makes it more di cult to observe the memory problems in the traditional way. Currently, there is no available debugger helpful especially for MPI semantic memory errors, i. e. detecting memory problem or potential errors according to the standard. For this speci c purpose, in this dissertation memory checking tools have been implemented. And the corresponding frameworks in Open MPI for parallel applications based on MPI semantics have been developed, using di erent existing memory debugging tool interfaces. Developers are able to detect hard to nd bugs, such as memory violations, bu er overrun, inconsistent parameters and so on. This memory checking tool provides detailed comprehensible error messages that will be most helpful for MPI developers. Furthermore, the memory checking frameworks may also help improve the performance of MPI based parallel applications by detecting whether the communicated data is used or not. The new memory checking tools may also be used in other projects or debuggers to perform di erent memory checks. The memory checking tools do not only apply to MPI parallel applications, but may also be used in other kind of applications that require memory checking. The technology allows programmers to handle and implement their own memory checking functionalities in a exible way, which means they may de ne what information they want to know about the memory and how the memory in the application should be checked and reported. The world of high performance computing is Linux-dominated and open source based. However Microsoft is becoming also a more important role in this domain, establishing its foothold with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. In this work, the advantages and disadvantages of these two HPC operating systems will be discussed. To amend programmability and portability, we introduce a version of Open MPI for Windows with