A software environment for programming distributed memory machines

Abstract

For efficiency, multiprocessor local memory machines work mostly on the message passing principle, and therefore are programmed using the framework of communicating sequential processes. This programming should be easy to do, and this ease obviously requires an adequate software environment. One such environment, ADAM, is the main topic of the paper. Especially important and time consuming in the development cycle of a distributed application is the debugging phase. Therefore among the tools provided by the ADAM environment, those dedicated to debugging have been emphasized. The most interesting are: a centralized simulator-debugger at the level of the language; a tool based upon traces that enables to see the communication that took place during an execution. The most original part of this work consists of debugging mechanisms dedicated to communication.<>