How to debug solvcon?

[Lei Shi]

Hi,

Great job! Since it has the mixed python/c/cuda code. How do you guys debug solvcon? Are there any tutorial talking about this? thank you.

[Yung-Yu Chen]

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Lei Shi <stone...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Great job! Since it has the mixed python/c/cuda code. How do you guys debug solvcon? Are there any tutorial talking about this? thank you.

It's a good question.  We debug SOLVCON mainly by using stupid console or file output, for two reasons: (i) To assess issues in the numerical methods, it's usually necessary to see the visualized results rather than values in memory.  Even small simulations consist of tens of thousands of elements.  It's very difficult to understand what's happening by directly reading the arrays without visualization.  (ii) Distributed-memory parallelization is an important feature of SOLVCON, and stepping execution in a debugger isn't a very useful technique for distributed computing.

Debugger is sometimes useful, like dealing with weird segfaults.  But using a debugger you'd better have your Python built in the debug mode, any thus every Python package needs to be compiled in debug mode.  It doesn't seem a very fruitful approach to me.  In my experience, the most challenging debugging efforts in SOLVCON are all about numerical methods.  For those issues, pencils and ParaView helped much more than anything else.

Let me know if you need to know more.

yyc

 

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Yung-Yu Chen

http://solvcon.net/yyc/

+886 (99) 129 4763

[Lei Shi]

Hi Yung-Yu,

Thank you for your reply. Using Python for CFD is pretty amazing. Have a great weekend.