Nowadays it's not uncommon to run parallel applications with hundreds of thousands of processes on supercomputing platforms. Debugging these parallel applications with sporadic crashes, deadlocks, memory errors or incorrect results is a challenging task. There are number of tools available that help identifying and fixing bugs but one needs to understand tools, their capabilities and when they can be used. This post tries to summarise various debugging tools (open source as well as commercial).

Note that not all tools can be used with distributed applications. For example, open source tools like GDB and Valgrind are commonly used for debugging serial, multi-threaded applications.… Read the rest