[petsc-dev] Alice Memory Snooper code

[Dinesh Kaushik]

Barry,

David and I are interested in this. At KAUST, we are starting a joint 
project with IBM in 'Computational Steering and Visualization'. It will 
be good to reassess this code under the current requirements.

Thanks,

Dinesh

Barry Smith said the following on 2/24/10 11:26 PM:
> 
>    I have located the tarball for the Alice Memory Snooper code (AMS). 
> If anybody would like a copy of it to look at, send me an email. The 
> code is ten years old and its makefile system is out of date and would 
> need minor working to get things compiled. This does not include any 
> PETSc code or interface code specific to PETSc (that can be found in 
> very old PETSc tarballs if anyone is interested).
> 
>   How it works. You register blocks of memory and their sizes in your 
> program via an API with names and then "lock" and "unlock" read and 
> write access to those registered blocks via the API. There can be a 
> hierarchy of these registered blocks. Then other programs can via 
> another API, access these blocks of memory and read and write values to 
> them. It is implemented by having the original process spawn a thread 
> that waits for socket connects and processing the requests, subject to 
> locks that may be turned on and off in the original program. It can be 
> built so that original program is a parallel program running with MPI.  
> It provides a way for someone to "find out what the heck is actually 
> going on" in a long running program without resorting to printfs and 
> other nonsense. It is pretty well documented.
> 
>   It is a pretty sweet model and piece of code but would require a small 
> amount of hacking to get running. If anyone wants to hack at it we could 
> set up a repository.
> 
>    Barry
> 
>   When we developed it, ORNL had a similar but much more limited piece 
> of software that ran on top of PVM called CUMULUS, we were told that ANL 
> shouldn't spend any money on AMS because it "competed" with CUMULUS. 
> Hence I dropped it, that was over 10 years ago so I don't see that as an 
> issue any more.