Poet (Partial-Order Event Tracer) - The Shoshin Debugger
Overview
Poet is the result of a long-running research project
in the
Shoshin group of the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Although the project
was originally conceived as a project in distributed debugging, Poet is
best described now as a tool for instrumenting a distributed
application to collect event traces of its execution. In a truly
distributed environment, these traces constitute a partial order, since
there is no single consistent time reference available on all
processors participating in the execution.
Research Activity
The main research contributions of this project, in addition to the Poet
prototype, involve algorithms for event collection and logical timestamping,
process and event abstraction (both manual and automatic), scrolling
algorithms for the partial-order display, and a theory for assigning logical
timestamps to abstract events. In the past, the group has participated in
the
MANDAS project. This work
attempted to extend our work not only towards a fully functional debugger,
but also in the direction of tools for the management of distributed
applications and systems.
Contact
David Taylor(
dtaylor@math.uwaterloo.ca)
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