Scalable parallel debugging with statistical assertions

Abstract

Traditional debuggers are of limited value for modern scientific codes that manipulate large complex data structures. This paper discusses a novel debug-time assertion, called a "Statistical Assertion", that allows a user to reason about large data structures, and the primitives are parallelised to provide an efficient solution. We present the design and implementation of statistical assertions, and illustrate the debugging technique with a molecular dynamics simulation. We evaluate the performance of the tool on a 12,000 cores Cray XE6.