[petsc-users] debugging with no X11 available

[Dominik Szczerba]

Thanks for your answers. Meanwhile I clarified the situation a bit:

I can bring xterm up manually from the command line, but the job is
run using a scheduler (slurm). It then gets executed on arbitrary
nodes (some stripped down linux) which apparently can not make X11
connections.
Of course, they have their own debugging environment, but I just do
not want to learn it now. The admins are unable to help me more. I
tried running the debugger explicitly:

aprun -n 2 -N 1 -d 1 -cc cpu gdb Solver run.xml

but so only one gdb instance is invoked in the terminal window, the
other is in a parallel universe or something... Still any chance to
get the second window somehow?

Thanks
Dominik

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Aron Ahmadia <aron.ahmadia at kaust.edu.sa> wrote:
> Sorry, to expand my answer, "what Matt said".  You don't have the advantage
> of using the functionality of -start_in_debugger if you cannot make X11
> connections from the compute nodes, so you will need to rely on whatever
> debugging facilities your systems team has set up, and break on PetscError
> if you want to catch PETSc errors percolating up the stack.
>
> A
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Aron Ahmadia <aron.ahmadia at kaust.edu.sa>
> wrote:
>>
>> Not on a BG/P you can't.
>>
>> A
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 2:48 AM, Dominik Szczerba <dominik at itis.ethz.ch>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>> I am debugging my code on a system that does not allow any X11
>>>> connections, therefore the following does not work:
>>>>
>>>> mpiexec -n 2 solver run.xml -start_in_debugger -display :0.0
>>>>
>>>> Are there alternative ways of using a debugger circumventing X11
>>>> connections?
>>>
>>>
>>> No. You can usually set the DISPLAY correctly for the backend machine.
>>> Consult the admin.
>>>
>>>    Matt
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>> Dominik
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
>>> experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
>>> experiments lead.
>>> -- Norbert Wiener
>>
>>
>