Backtracking and re-execution in the automatic debugging of parallelized programs

Abstract

In this work we describe a new approach using relative debugging to find differences in computation between a serial program and a parallel version of that program. We use a combination of re-execution and backtracking in order to find the first difference in computation that may ultimately lead to an incorrect value that the user has indicated. In our prototype implementation we use static analysis information from a parallelization tool in order to perform the backtracking as well as the mapping required between serial and parallel computations.