Analyzing message-passing programs through visual slicing

Program slicing decomposes a large program into smaller sections that contain statements relevant to a computation under study. This paper presents a novel method for visual slicing of message passing programs. Each slice is computed based on predicates and focuses on inter-process messages that influence the predicate. A predicate slice is visualized based on the space-time diagram and captures some global requirements or suspected error properties of the distributed program. We have implemented the methods in Visper, an MPI-like message-passing environment that supports high level services such as check-pointing and fault tolerance.