Debugging Jobs¶

Debugging Flux jobs has been tested with Rogue Wave Software (RWS)’s TotalView parallel debugger and Linaro DDT. More detailed instructions for specific debuggers are included in the sections below.

Parallel Debugging using TotalView¶

Debugging your MPI job from the beginning of parallel program execution:

$ totalview --args flux run -N 2 -n 2 ./mpi-program

Attaching to an already running job:

$ flux job attach --debug <JOBID> &
$ PID=$!
$ totalview -pid ${PID} /proc/${PID}/exe

You can also just type totalview without -pid option.

For the TotalView Classic user interface, select the process of this flux-job command with Start a Debugging Session ‣ A running program (attach).

For new UI: use Attach To Process.

Flux provides MPIR_partial_attach_ok [1] so you can attach TotalView to a subset of parallel processes as well, which can be handy when you debug a large-scale job. Please refer to TotalView user guide on its subset-attach capability.

Exiting TotalView without completing a full run of your code may not clean up the Flux job. In that case you will need to cancel the flux job manually.

$ flux cancel <JOBID>

Better Handling of Flux’s Internal Exec Events¶

Flux executes a series of subcommands before launching your parallel program. Thus, a side effect of the above commands is that TotalView will stop Flux’s own program execution each time a new subcommand is exec(3)’ed (e.g., when flux exec’s flux-run) before your parallel program processes are spawned. This means you must manually click “Yes” whenever a stop-at-exec dialogue window is popped up. You do not need to stop it unless you are a Flux developer! Instead, you can make TotalView automatically continue on these events by building the the following exec-handling Tcl code into TotalView:

catch {dset TV::exec_handling { {^(flux|lrun|srun|jsrun)(<python[^>]*>(<flux-job>)?|<bash>|<jsrun>|<jswrap>)*$ go}} }

This code should either be added to the site-wide .tvdrc file to enable this for all TotalView sessions or per-user file (e.g., tvdrc in the current working directory) to enable this only for the user’s own sessions. For the latter case, you should provide -s tvdrc option to totalview. For example,

$ totalview -s tvdrc --args flux run -N 2 -n 2 ./mpi-program

Notice that it is designed to support not only Flux but also Slurm’s srun and IBM JSM’s jsrun commands. The regex syntax of exec_handling within TotalView can be found in TotalView user guide.

Parallel Debugging with DDT¶

While at this time DDT does not have native support for Flux, small to medium size jobs can be debugged with DDT using a combination of the flux job(1) hostpids command and the ddt --attach option. For example, to attach ddt to the previous job

$ ddt --attach=$(flux job hostpids $(flux job last))

Flux can launch jobs with every task stopped in exec(2) by providing the stop-tasks-in-exec job shell option. Thus, launching a job under control of DDT can be simulated by something like:

$ ddt --attach=$(flux job hostpids $(flux submit -n 265 myapp))

The flux job hostpids command will block until the job has started running and the process IDs for all tasks are available, and therfore ddt will not launch until the job has started and is ready for debugger attach. Since tasks have been stopped in exec(2), the debugger will have control of job tasks before execution begins.

Known Issues¶

Parallel debugging support within Flux is new and we are working with tool builders to mature our functionality further. This section documents some of known limitations.

1. Depending on how the site configured TotalView, the parallel program may not stop at the first instruction to allow TotalView to debug them from the beginning of execution. For performance reasons, TotalView can be configured not to stop and process dynamic libraries and this can cause this issue. RWS is actively looking at this issue.