ARCHIVED: On AVIDD at IU, what debugging tools are available, and how do I use them?

Note: UITS began retiring the AVIDD system on May 1 as originally scheduled, but portions of the system will remain online until mid-August. UITS retired AVIDD-T, AVIDD-N, and AVIDD-I on May 1, but is delaying the retirement of AVIDD-B and AVIDD-O pending the installation of a replacement system based on Intel's X86-64 technology. If you use AVIDD-B or AVIDD-O, UITS encourages you to migrate to Big Red and/or the TeraGrid; for help, email High Performance Computing. If you cannot migrate, AVIDD-B and AVIDD-O will remain available to you until the new system is ready for use in mid-August.

The debuggers available on the AVIDD cluster at Indiana University include GNU GDB, IDB (Intel Linux Application Debugger), and TotalView. You can use GDB and IDB to debug serial programs, while TotalView (MPI only) is for debugging parallel programs.

For information on how to use these debuggers, refer to the following documentation:

• GNU GDB online documentation: http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb_toc.html
• For information on the TotalView debugger and profiling tools such as Intel Trace Collector/Analyzer, refer to the "Tools for Programmers" section on the High Performance Computing web site: http://rc.uits.iu.edu/hpc/pl/tools.shtml

This document was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0503697 to the University of Chicago and subcontracted to Indiana University. Additional support was provided by IU through its participation in the TeraGrid, which is supported by the NSF under Grants No. 0833618, SCI451237, SCI535258, and SCI504075. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.