The workshop is a full-day event at IPDPS 2003 focusing on techniques and systems that aid in debugging and testing parallel and distributed systems. The workshop has a practical and applied emphasis on systems that have been implemented in (at least) prototype form. This workshop concentrates on works whose main contributions are in the field of testing and debugging. Works with contribution in testing but with a primary impact in other fields should be submitted to other workshops at IPDPS. For example, work addressing high-level language and environment issues should be submitted to HIPS, formal methods to FMPP, and modeling to PMEO. If the author is unsure where to submit work, please feel free to contact the workshop chairs for suggestions.
Although debuggers and profilers are the traditional examples of these tools on sequential machines, there are issues unique to parallel and distributed systems that are not commonly addressed. For example, deadlock, load imbalance, data sharing patterns, race conditions, and contention are important problems. In order to find some classes of bugs in multi-threaded, parallel, and distributed applications, specific timing conditions are required. As a result, timing bugs are found very late in the testing process or by the end users. Many established testing techniques and tools are insufficient for non-sequential programs.
Topics of interest to the workshop include, but are not limited to
Test generation algorithms for multi-threaded/parallel/distributed applications
