TotalView is designed to debug multi-process, multi-threaded programs, with a rich feature set to support fine-grained control over individual or multiple threads and processes. This level of control makes it possible to quickly resolve problems like deadlocks or race conditions in a complex program that spawns thousands of processes and threads across a broad network of computer nodes.

When your program creates processes and threads, TotalView can automatically bring them under its control, whether they are local or remote. If the processes are already running, TotalView can attach to them as well, avoiding the need to run multiple debuggers.

TotalView places a debugger server process on each remote node as it is launched that then communicates with the main TotalView client process. This debugging architecture gives you a central location from which you can manage and examine all aspects of your program.

This chapter introduces some tools and features that support parallel debugging.