GEM: graphical explorer of MPI programs

Formal dynamic verification complements MPI program testing by detecting hard-to-find concurrency bugs. These bugs are elusive and difficult to reproduce and track down using conventional methods due to the difficulty in determining the state of a program when the bug occurs. In previous work, we described our dynamic verifier called In-situ Partial Order (ISP [5]) that can efficiently search the execution space of an MPI program while detecting important classes of bugs. ISP does this by executing processes under the control of its own scheduler. One major limitation of ISP, when used by itself, is the lack of a powerful and widely usable graphical front-end. We now present a new tool called Graphical Explorer of MPI Programs (GEM [2]) that overcomes this limitation. GEM is designed as an Eclipse plug-in within the Parallel Tools Platform (PTP [1]), a rapidly evolving tool integration framework for parallel program development and analysis. GEM serves to bring ISP within reach of a wide array of programmers with its original release as part of PTP version 3.0 in December, 2009. Our poster illustrates the motivation for GEM, an overview of its features and our future plans.