Section: New Software and Platforms

mcGDB: Interactive debugging of OpenMP programs

MCGDB introduced the concept of programming-model centric source-level interactive debugging as an extension of the traditional language-level interactive debugging. The idea was to integrate into debuggers the notion of programming models, as abstract machines running over the physical ones. These abstract machines, implemented by runtime libraries and programming frameworks, provide the high-level primitives required for the implementation of today’s parallel applications.

We developed a proof-of-concept, mcGDB, as a Python extension of GDB, the debugger of the GNU project. mcGDB was initially developed by Kevin Pouget during his thesis with STMicroelectronics. mcGDB is currently extended with the Nano2017/DEMA project.

We proposed the new support of mcGDB for OpenMP task-based programming. This support consists of task-based execution representation and control improvements, in cooperation with Temanejo graphical debugger. We also studied import implementation details of mcGDB, related to the support of multiple OpenMP environments and CPU architectures; the separation of cross-cutting concerns (user interaction and execution representing) through aspect-oriented programming, and the first steps of mcGDB micro-benchmarking.

mcGDB [30] was presented at the second OpenMPCon developpers conference in Nara.