Integrating Temporal Assertions into a Parallel Debugger

Kovács, József; Kusper, Gábor; Lovas, Róbert; Schreiner, Wolfgang

doi:10.1007/3-540-45706-2_12

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Moreover, the automatic correctness evaluation of consistent global states [19] at each macrostep is in our research plan together with the further elaboration of modelling and steering mechanisms [18] towards possible suspicious or erroneous situations in the generated execution tree. This smart functionality will rely on graph-based machine learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Breakpoints can be placed in the execution tree as well, in which case they are called meta-breakpoints, essentially meaning that the parallel program is steered to a specified node in the execution tree. Using an appropriate debugging tool that can generate suitable collective breakpoints [4], one can achieve the complete [18] and exhaustive testing [19] of parallel programs.…”

Section: Original Concept For Message-passing Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fundamentals of a Novel Debugging Mechanism for Orchestrated Cloud Infrastructures with Macrosteps and Active Control

et al. 2021

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In Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, the development process of a ready-to-use and reliable infrastructure might be a complex task due to the interconnected and dependent services that are deployed (and operated later on) in a concurrent way on virtual machines. Different timing conditions may change the overall initialisation method, which can lead to abnormal behaviour or failure in the non-deterministic environment. The overall motivation of our research is to improve the reliability of cloud-based infrastructures with minimal user interactions and significantly accelerate the time-consuming debugging process. This paper focuses on the behaviour of cloud-based infrastructures during their deployment phase and introduces the adaption of a replay, and active control enriched debugging technique, called macrostep, in the field of cloud orchestration in order to provide support for developers troubleshooting deployment-related errors. The fundamental macrostep mechanisms, including the generation of collective breakpoint sets as well as the traversal method for such consistent global states, have been combined with the Occopus cloud orchestrator and the Neo4J graph database. The paper describes the novel approach, the design choices as well as the implementation of the experimental debugger tool with a use case for validation purposes by providing some preliminary numerical results.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Original Concept For Message-passing Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fundamentals of a Novel Debugging Mechanism for Orchestrated Cloud Infrastructures with Macrosteps and Active Control

et al. 2021

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“…trying not only to replay but also to enforce different (timing) conditions onto the investigated set of processes (services) in the dynamically changing and non-deterministic environment. The literature [40] illustrated its basic principles and mechanism with the well-known Producer-Consumer problem and its implementation in the P-GRADE programming environment using an inner Buffer process with a circular puffer, message passing paradigm and synchronous communication primitives. The illustration described a typical bug, when the two branches of a conditional (if-then-else) construct have been accidentally swapped and led to an erroneous situation, which was discovered during the macrostep based debugging by traversing and investigating the possible state space of the problem.…”

Section: B Baseline Model: Producer-consumermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The labelling is also supported in PRISM: the 'nolostmessage' global property was evaluated by each simulation step successfully in order to verify the most crucial requirement of the model, i.e. the already produced but still unconsumed items are stored in the buffer: Similarly to the original work [40], we injected one error manually in the implementation and its model. The behaviour of the buffer has become faulty because it switches to the serving state instead of receiving an item in the first command.…”

Section: B Baseline Model: Producer-consumermentioning

confidence: 99%

Experiences With Deep Learning Enhanced Steering Mechanisms for Debugging of Fundamental Cloud Services

2023

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Cloud architecture blueprints or reference architectures allow the reuse of existing knowledge and best practices when creating new cloud native solutions. Therefore, debugging reference architecture candidates (or their new versions) is an extremely crucial but tedious and time-consuming task due to the deployment of complex services in typical multi-tenant and non-deterministic environments. During the debugging/testing/maintenance scenarios, we might be able to achieve greater levels of test coverage (and eventually improved reliability) by modelling and verifying at least their most fundamental building blocks. The main objective of our work is to integrate the stochastic modelling and verification techniques based on deep learning methods into the debugging cycle in order to handle large state spaces more efficiently, i.e. by steering the process of traversing state space towards suspicious situations that may result in potential bugs in the actual system with smart steering during the traversal. For this purpose, our presented and illustrated approach combines (among others) Continuous Time Markov Chain modelling (CTMC) techniques with deep learning methods including autoencoder, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Graph Neural Network (GNN) models. Our experiences are summarized with widespread cloud design patterns including load balancing and service mesh topologies.

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“…Kovacs et al [23] present a framework for writing full temporal assertions on message passing programs. Although these temporal assertions are powerful, they are also complex.…”

Section: A What They Check -Property Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel assertions for debugging parallel programs

Schwartz-Narbonne

Liu

Pondicherry

et al. 2011

Ninth ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Codesign (MEMPCODE2011)

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Abstract-A parallel program must execute correctly even in the presence of unpredictable thread interleavings. This interleaving makes it hard to write correct parallel programs, and also makes it hard to find bugs in incorrect parallel programs. A range of tools have been developed to help debug parallel programs, ranging from atomicity-violation and data-race detectors to model-checkers and theorem provers. One technique that has been successful for debugging sequential programs, but less effective for parallel programs, is running the program using assertion predicates provided by the developer.These assertions allow programmers to specify and check their assumptions. In a multi-threaded program, the programmer's assumptions include both the current state, and any actions (e.g. access to shared memory) that other, parallel executing threads might take. We introduce parallel assertions which allow programmers to express these assumptions for parallel programs using simple and intuitive syntax and semantics. We present a proof-of-concept implementation, and demonstrate its value by testing a number of benchmark programs using parallel assertions.

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Integrating Temporal Assertions into a Parallel Debugger

Cited by 8 publications

References 11 publications

Fundamentals of a Novel Debugging Mechanism for Orchestrated Cloud Infrastructures with Macrosteps and Active Control

Fundamentals of a Novel Debugging Mechanism for Orchestrated Cloud Infrastructures with Macrosteps and Active Control

Experiences With Deep Learning Enhanced Steering Mechanisms for Debugging of Fundamental Cloud Services

Parallel assertions for debugging parallel programs

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