Valgrind 3.3 - Advanced Debugging and Profiling for GNU/Linux applications by J. Seward, N. Nethercote, J. Weidendorfer and the Valgrind Development Team Paperback (6"x9"), 164 pages ISBN 0954612051 RRP £12.95 ($19.95) Get a printed copy>>>

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5.8 Debugging MPI Parallel Programs with Valgrind

Valgrind supports debugging of distributed-memory applications which use the MPI message passing standard. This support consists of a library of wrapper functions for the ‘PMPI_*’ interface. When incorporated into the application's address space, either by direct linking or by ‘LD_PRELOAD’, the wrappers intercept calls to ‘PMPI_Send’, ‘PMPI_Recv’, etc. They then use client requests to inform Valgrind of memory state changes caused by the function being wrapped. This reduces the number of false positives that Memcheck otherwise typically reports for MPI applications.

The wrappers also take the opportunity to carefully check size and definedness of buffers passed as arguments to MPI functions, hence detecting errors such as passing undefined data to ‘PMPI_Send’, or receiving data into a buffer which is too small.

Unlike most of the rest of Valgrind, the wrapper library is subject to a BSD-style license, so you can link it into any code base you like. See the top of ‘auxprogs/libmpiwrap.c’ for license details.