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=== 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:

==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.

When we are inside the source code of a program in Visual Studio, build your program, simply click on the dropdowns besides the Intel Inspector icon, select "New Analysis"

[[File:Dropdowns.jpg|1100px]]

Now we are inside the analysis panel, select the analysis type, deepness of analysis, and extra options, then press start to launch analysis

[[File:GUIpanel.jpg|1100px]]

Now the Intel Inspector runs the code and trying to debug. The debug progress is shown in the collection log. When the analysis is complete, click on the "Summary" tag and the error type and location the error is shown in the panels respectively.

[[File:CollectionLog.jpg|1100px]]

===Memory Leak===

In order to test the memory leak diagnosis, the following code snippet is used as the error code.

<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp" line='line'>

}

</syntaxhighlight>

As we can see the variable 'c' is assigned a heap resource but never deallocate. We run this program in Intel Inspector

[[File:MemoryLeak.png|1100px]]

The inspection result shows where the leak resource comes from and its location in the code.

===Invalid Memory Access===

A special program is used as an example in this section. The inspection on the TBB parallel_for workshop perfectly demonstrates the compatibility of Intel Inspector towards Threading Building Blocks algorithm.

<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp" line='line'>

};

</syntaxhighlight>

Inspection result

[[File:TBBinvalidAccess.jpg|1100px]]

}

</syntaxhighlight>

Incorrect results generated by the race condition code.

[[File:RaceResult1.jpg|500px]] [[File:RaceResult2.jpg|500px]]

Inspection summary by Intel Inspector

[[File:DataRace.jpg|1100px]]

Using Intel Inspector, data race is quickly detected and located.

The following program uses the Mutex template to create a deadlock scenario.

<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp" line='line'>

}

</syntaxhighlight>

Program Outputs (Correct output and encounters deadlock)

[[File:DeadLockNoIssue.jpg|500px]] [[File:DeadLockWithIssue.jpg|530px]]

Intel Inspector result

[[File:LocateDeadLock.jpg|1100px]]

With the use of Intel Inspector, the deadlock is quickly detected and located. By tracing the call stack we know which locations in our source code produced the deadlock.