Robust Non-Intrusive Record-Replay with Processor Extraction

With the advent of increasingly larger parallel machines, debugging is becoming more and more challenging. In particular, applications at this scale tend to behave non-deterministically, leading to race condition bugs. Furthermore, gaining access to these large machines for long debugging sessions is generally infeasible. In this paper, we present a 3-step algorithm to perform what we call ``processor extraction'': a procedure to record the execution of a set of processors from a parallel application, and replay any of them in a controlled environment. Our technique generates very low interference in the recorded program thanks to the separation between non-determinism elimination, and detailed processor recording. In order to improve robustness and accuracy, we further augmented our algorithm with a self-correction mechanism.

Filippo Gioachin and Gengbin Zheng and Laxmikant V. Kal{\'e},, "Robust Record-Replay with Processor Extraction", in Proceedings of the Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging (PADTAD - VIII), 2010

@inproceedings{Recplay-extraction,
     author = "Filippo Gioachin and Gengbin Zheng and Laxmikant V. Kal{\'e}",
     title = "{Robust Record-Replay with Processor Extraction}",
     booktitle = "PADTAD '10: Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging",
     location  = "Trento, Italy",
     month         = "July",
     year          = "2010",
     isbn = {978-1-4503-0136-7},
     pages = {9--19},
     doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1866210.1866211},
     publisher = {ACM},
}