Charm++ offers a variety of parallel debugging options, from the extremely basic to the extremely sophisticated. The traditional debugging methods, such as logging (via the CkPrintf routine) and interactive debugging (via the "++debug" command line option) are supported under Charm++.

In addition, Charm++ offers several additional features designed to simplify application development. Linking with "-memory paranoid" checks all dynamic heap allocation calls for common errors, such as double-delete, random-delete, read-after-delete, buffer over- and under-write errors. Charm++, when compiled without "-DCMK_OPTIMIZE", contains hundreds of assertations to catch invalid parameters and unintialized data passed to API routines.

We are working on a sophisticated parallel debugger, with the ability to set breakpoints, examine variables, objects, and messages across the entire machine. The design of this debugger is described in the paper below.
 

• Filippo Gioachin

• 08-08    Filippo Gioachin, Laxmikant V. Kale ,  Memory Tagging in Charm++,  Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging (PADTAD '08)
• 04-04    Rashmi Jyothi, Orion Sky Lawlor and L. V. Kale,  Debugging Support for Charm++,  Proceedings of PADTAD Workshop, held as part of IPDPS 2004, IEEE Press, page 294.
• 03-13    Rashmi Jyothi,  Debugging Support for Charm++,  University of Illinois Computer Science 2003 Master's Thesis
• 99-04    Parthasarathy Ramachandran and Laxmikant V. Kale ,  Mulitlingual Debugging Support for Data-driven and Thread-based Parallel Languages,  Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proc. of 12th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC '99), pages 236-250