An Interface to Support the Identification of Dynamic MPI 2 Processes for Scalable Parallel Debugging

This paper proposes an interface that will allow MPI 2 dynamic programs – those using MPI SPAWN, CONNECT/ACCEPT, or JOIN – to provide information to parallel debuggers such as TotalView about the set of processes that constitute an individual application. The TotalView parallel debugger currently obtains information about the identity of processes directly from the MPI library using a widely accepted proctable interface. The existing interface does not support MPI 2 dynamic operations. The proposed interface supports MPI 2 dynamic operations, subset debugging, and helps the parallel debugger assign meaningful names to processes.