Vdebug: debugging tool for parallel scientific programs. Design report on vdebug

We report on a debugging tool called vdebug which supports debugging work for parallel scientific simulation programs. It is difficult to debug scientific programs with an existing debugger, because the volume of data generated by the programs is too large for users to check data in characters. Usually, the existing debugger shows data values in characters. To alleviate it, we have developed vdebug which enables to check the validity of large amounts of data by showing these data values visually. Although targets of vdebug have been restricted to sequential programs, we have made it applicable to parallel programs by realizing the function of merging and visualizing data distributed on programs on each computer node. Now, vdebug works on seven kinds of parallel computers. In this report, we describe the design of vdebug. (author)