skip to main content
10.1145/224170.224350acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesscConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Relative debugging and its application to the development of large numerical models

Published: 08 December 1995 Publication History

Abstract

Because large scientific codes are rarely static objects, developers are often faced with the tedious task of accounting for discrepancies between new and old versions. In this paper, we describe a new technique called relative debugging that addresses this problem by automating the process of comparing a modified code against a correct reference code. We examine the utility of the relative debugging technique by applying a relative debugger called Guard to a range of debugging problems in a large atmospheric circulation model. Our experience confirms the effectiveness of the approach. Using Guard, we are able to validate a new sequential version of the atmospheric model, and to identify the source of a significant discrepancy in a parallel version in a short period of time.

References

[1]
R. Anthes. 1986 summary of workshop on the NCAR Community Climate/Forecast models. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 67:194-198, 1986.
[2]
Z. Aral, I. Gertner, and G. Schaffer. Efficient debugging primitives for multiprocessors. In Proc. of the 3nd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pages 87-95. ACM, 1989.
[3]
J. Brown and K. Campana. An economical time-differencing system for numerical weather prediction. Mon. Wea. Rev., (106):1125-1136, 1978.
[4]
J. Dudhia. A nonhydrostatic version of the Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model: Validation tests and simulation of an Atlantic cyclone and cold front. Technical report, National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1992.
[5]
I. Foster and J. Michalakes. MPMM: A Massively Parallel Mesoscale Model. In Geered-R Hoffmann and Tuomo Kauranne, editors, Parallel Supercomputing in Atmospheric Science, pages 354-363. World Scientific, River Edge, NJ 07661, 1993.
[6]
N. Galbreath, W. Gropp, and D. Levine. Applications-driven parallel I/O. In Proceedings Supercomputing-93, Portland, Oregon, pages 462-471. IEEE, 1993.
[7]
Georg A. Grell, Jimmy Dudhia, and David R. Stauffer. A Description of the Fifth-Generation Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5). Technical Report NCAR/TN-398+STR, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, June 1994.
[8]
J. H. Griffin, H. J. Wasserman, and L. P. McGavran. A debugger for parallel processes. Software-Practice and Experience, 18(12):1179-1190, December 1988.
[9]
C. E. McDowell and D. P. Helmbold. Debugging concurrent programs. ACM Computing Surveys, 21(4):593-622, December 1989.
[10]
J. Michalakes, T. Canfield, R. Nanjundiah, S. Hammond, and G. Grell. Parallel Implementation, Validation, and Performance of MM5. In Parallel Supercomputing in Atmospheric Science. World Scientific, River Edge, NJ 07661, 1994.
[11]
T. G. Moher. PROVIDE: A process visualization and debugging environment. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 14(6):849-857, June 1988.
[12]
R. A. Olsson, R. H. Crawford, and W. W. Ho. A dataflow approach to event-based debugging. Software-Practice and Experience, 21(2):209-229, February 1991.
[13]
E. Satterthwaite. Debugging tools for high level languages. Software-Practice and Experience, 2(3):197-217, July-September 1972.
[14]
T. Shimomura and S. Isoda. Linked-list visualization for debugging. IEEE Software, 8(3):44-51, May 1991.
[15]
R. Sosic. Design and implementation of Dynascope, a directing platform for compiled programs. Computing Systems, to appear, 1995.
[16]
R. Sosic. A procedural interface for program directing. Software-Practice and Experience, 25(7):767-787, 1995.
[17]
P. T. Zellweger. Interactive source-level debugging of optimized programs. Technical Report CSL-84-5, Xerox PARC, 1984.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Relative debugging and its application to the development of large numerical models

                        Recommendations

                        Comments

                        Information & Contributors

                        Information

                        Published In

                        cover image ACM Conferences
                        Supercomputing '95: Proceedings of the 1995 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
                        December 1995
                        875 pages
                        ISBN:0897918169
                        DOI:10.1145/224170
                        • Chairman:
                        • Sid Karin
                        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

                        Sponsors

                        Publisher

                        Association for Computing Machinery

                        New York, NY, United States

                        Publication History

                        Published: 08 December 1995

                        Permissions

                        Request permissions for this article.

                        Check for updates

                        Author Tags

                        1. Debugging
                        2. Guard
                        3. MM5
                        4. Meteorology
                        5. Parallelism
                        6. Relative Debugging
                        7. Scientific Computing
                        8. Tools

                        Qualifiers

                        • Article

                        Conference

                        SC '95
                        Sponsor:

                        Acceptance Rates

                        Supercomputing '95 Paper Acceptance Rate 69 of 241 submissions, 29%;
                        Overall Acceptance Rate 1,516 of 6,373 submissions, 24%

                        Upcoming Conference

                        Contributors

                        Other Metrics

                        Bibliometrics & Citations

                        Bibliometrics

                        Article Metrics

                        • Downloads (Last 12 months)41
                        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
                        Reflects downloads up to 01 Jan 2025

                        Other Metrics

                        Citations

                        Cited By

                        View all

                        View Options

                        View options

                        HTML Format

                        View this article in HTML Format.

                        HTML Format

                        Login options

                        Media

                        Figures

                        Other

                        Tables

                        Share

                        Share

                        Share this Publication link

                        Share on social media