GPU621/Intel Parallel Studio Inspector

GPU621/DPS921 | Participants | Groups and Projects | Resources | Glossary

Group Members

1. Yuhao Lu

2. Song Zeng

3. Jiawei Yang

Intel Parallel Studio Inspector

Description

The purpose of this project is to provide a functional overview of the Intel Inspector, which is a correctness checking program that detects and locates threading errors (deadlocks and data races) and memory errors (memory leaks and illegal memory accesses) of an application. In this project, the functional components and the graphical user interface of the Intel Inspector are demonstrated by use case examples. The successful delivery of this project concludes that how to utilize this tool from Intel to improve the accuracy and efficiency when developing memory and computation-intensive application.

Features and Functionalities

Features

Intel Inspector provides developers a way to secure their program by detecting and locating memory and threading errors. When a program is large and the logic within it is complicated, the memory and threading bugs become difficult to locate. This is particularly true when developing programs that need to be optimized using multi-threading approaches. Intel Inspector offers parallelization model support, which includes the support to:

• OpenMP
• TBB
• Parallel language extensions for the Intel C++ Compiler
• Microsoft PPL
• Win32 and POSIX threads
• Intel MPI Library

Besides, Intel Inspector also supports various languages (C, C++, and Fortran), operating systems (Windows and Linux), IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.), and compilers (Intel C++, Intel Fortran, Visual C++, GCC, etc.). These all together make Intel Inspector a convenient and efficient tool in helping developers build and test complicated programs and HPCs more easily.

Functionalilites

In terms of functionalities, the Intel Inspector four different debuggers: Correctness Analyzer & Debugger, Memory Debugger, Threading Debugger, and Persistent Memory Debugger. In the scope of this course and project, we will focus on the first three debuggers.

Correctness Analyzer & Debugger

Normally a debugging process inserts a breakpoint right at the location where an error occurs. However, it is sometimes hard to find out what exactly the problem is because that location may have been executed hundreds of times. The Correctness Analyzer & Debugger makes the Intel Inspector work on the code without special recompiles for analysis. More, it makes the diagnosis faster by inserting breakpoints just before the error occurs into the debugger so that we know where and when the error occurs.

Memory Debugger

The memory problem is a big headache in programming. The Memory Debugger in Intel Inspector detects and locates the memory error location, as well as providing a graphical tool to show memory growth, locate the call stack and code where the memory growth is produced.

Threading Debugger

In a program, threading problems are very hard to detect and locate since they are usually considered 'errors' in the program logic. The reason for this is that threading problems are often non-deterministic problems such as race conditions and deadlock. These kinds of problems do not happen in every run of the program and even they happen, the program runs as usual but generates wrong outputs. The Threading Debugger inside Intel Inspector works as an efficient diagnosis tool against threading errors in the program even if the program does not encounter the error. This debugger is especially helpful when building HPC applications and optimizing codes using multi-threading algorithms.

How to use

It is extremely simple to use Intel Inspector. The Intel Inspector can work as a stand-alone application or as an insider function of the IDE. Here we use Microsoft Visual Studio as an example.

Progress

Update 1: Sunday, Nov 8, 2020 - Created home page. Update 2: Sunday, Nov 8, 2020 - Created home page.