Debugging MPICH Applications

In many cases, you can bypass the procedure described in this section. For more information, see “Debugging MPI Programs”.

To debug Message Passing Interface/Chameleon Standard (MPICH) applications, you must use MPICH version 1.2.3 or later on a homogeneous collection of computers. If you need a copy of MPICH, you can obtain it at no cost from Argonne National Laboratory at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpi/. (We strongly urge that you use a later version of MPICH. The TotalView Platforms and Systems Requirements document has information on versions that work with TotalView.)

The MPICH library should use the ch_p4, ch_p4mpd, ch_shmem, ch_lfshmem, or ch_mpl devices.

For networks of workstations, the default MPICH library is ch_p4.

For shared-memory SMP computers, use ch_shmem.

On an IBM SP computer, use the ch_mpl device.

The MPICH source distribution includes all these devices. Choose the one that best fits your environment when you configure and build MPICH.

When configuring MPICH, you must ensure that the MPICH library maintains all of the information that TotalView requires. This means that you must use the -enable-debug option with the MPICH configure command. (Versions earlier than 1.2 used the --debug option.) In addition, the TotalView Release Notes contains information on patching your MPICH version 1.2.3 distribution.

For more information, see:

“Starting TotalView on an MPICH Job”

“Attaching to an MPICH Job”

“Using MPICH P4 procgroup Files”