IPCDump Debugging MPI programs

Are there plans to process the raw communication data and provide a high-level event history for MPI communication? I think the scientific open source community is in desperate need of a tool to debug distributed codes.

Feb 23 '21 11:02 renatobellotti

Hey @renatobellotti can you please share some examples where you think IPCDump could help? How MPI Application usually communicate?

Mar 02 '21 15:03 liad-guardicore

Thanks for your answer.

Well, the problem is that I have no clue how MPI works internally. It is more a standard for a communication API, in the style of "send-array-to-process-a", "wait-for-array-from-process-b" and other stuff in that direction. I guess the implementation can even use different kinds of mechanism depending on which cores/nodes the processes run, but I'm just a user, I don't know what happens behind the scenes. I was hoping that you knew about MPI and could add something like a filter to group messages semantically. :)

Mar 16 '21 17:03 renatobellotti

As far as I know about MPI (which is not a lot) the mechanism on which it uses to pass information differs between implementations, but I do think it could be a nice feature to have a wrapper that knows how to identify MPI communication and present them in a nicer way than just random IPC events. (Not sure this is possible, but will be nice to check if it is and if it is, to implement it)

Apr 14 '21 08:04 liad-guardicore

I'm very happy to hear that, I think the scientific community would love this feature!

Apr 14 '21 09:04 renatobellotti