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UPC-CHECK: a scalable tool for detecting run-time errors in Unified Parallel C

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Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

Unified Parallel C (UPC) is a language used to write parallel programs for distributed memory parallel computers. UPC-CHECK (http://hpcgroup.public.iastate.edu/UPC-CHECK/) is a scalable tool developed to automatically detect argument errors in UPC functions and deadlocks in UPC programs at run-time and issue high quality error messages to help programmers quickly fix those errors. The run-time complexity of all detection techniques used are optimal, i.e. O(1) except for deadlocks involving locks where it is theoretically known to be linear in the number of threads. The tool is easy to use, and involves merely replacing the compiler command with upc-check. Error messages issued by UPC-CHECK were evaluated using the UPC RTED test suite for argument errors in UPC functions and deadlocks. Results of these tests show that the error messages issued by UPC-CHECK for these tests are excellent.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the United States Department of Defense & used resources of the Extreme Scale Systems Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Iowa State University’s High Performance Computing Group, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, USA

    James Coyle, Indranil Roy, Marina Kraeva & Glenn R. Luecke

Authors
  1. James Coyle
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  2. Indranil Roy
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  3. Marina Kraeva
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  4. Glenn R. Luecke
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Correspondence to Glenn R. Luecke.

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Coyle, J., Roy, I., Kraeva, M. et al. UPC-CHECK: a scalable tool for detecting run-time errors in Unified Parallel C. Comput Sci Res Dev 28, 203–209 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0214-4

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