Using XML to specify a trace format for MPI programs
Trace files have long been used to assist correctness debugging and performance debugging of parallel programs. With the advent of implementations of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, parallel and distributed computing has become more common, and thus the need for quality debugging tools has increased. It is important that trace file formats be extensible, flexible, and architecturally independent, the latter particularly if analysis is performed on a different platform to that which generated the trace. In this paper we propose a set of requirements for MPI-based trace libraries, and present a preliminary trace library, tracempi. An important contribution is that this trace format uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML), and XML Schema. By doing so, it is architecturally independent, well defined, and easily extended.
xml mpi trace files parallel program debugging