NUDA: a non-uniform debugging architecture and non-intrusive race detection for many-core

Traditional debug methodologies are limited in their ability to provide debugging support for many-core parallel programming. Synchronization problems or bugs due to race conditions are particularly difficult to detect with software debugging tools. Most traditional debugging approaches rely on globally synchronized signals, but these pose problems in terms of scalability. The first contribution of this paper is to propose a novel nonuniform debug architecture (NUDA) based on a ring interconnection schema. Our approach makes debugging both feasible and scalable for many-core processing scenarios. The key idea is to distribute the debugging support structures across a set of hierarchical clusters while avoiding address overlap. This allows the address space to be monitored using non-uniform protocols. Our second contribution is a non-intrusive approach to race detection supported by the NUDA. A non-uniform page-based monitoring cache in each NUDA node is used to watch the access footpr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Chi-Neng Wen, Shu-Hsuan Chou, Tien-Fu Chen, Alan Peisheng Su
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, DAC 2009, Debugging, Debugging Support, Most Traditional Debugging