[Beowulf] backtraces

[Greg Lindahl]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 08:54:28PM -0700, Craig Tierney wrote:

> I don't think that it is foreign to people writing new codes.
> It is foreign to scientists.

Most serious supercomputing scientists -- those who have finite
cpu allotments in particular -- put in checkpointing when
they realize it saves them valuable resources. Until they lose
work or money, it's not a priority.

> BTW, I like your code.  I had a script written for me in the past
> (by Greg Lindahl in a galaxy far-far away).

Hey, and here I was avoiding saying "You guys don't remember me
talking about easy backtrace in conferences in 2000 and 2001? I was
pretty insufferably on the topic..." That implementation used gdb and
had zero overhead other than the memory gdb took. But fewer processes
is always better, and OpenMPI and Intel and PathScale MPI & compilers
all use a library implementation somewhat like Mark's.

-- greg