Helping Developers Make Sense Of Distributed Systems

Ivan Beschastnikh, University of British Columbia

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Distributed systems pose unique challenges for software developers. Reasoning about concurrent activities of system nodes and even understanding a system's communication topology can be difficult. In this talk I will discuss two tools that my group has developed to help developers overcome some of these challenges. Both tool allow developers to gain insight into the runtime operation of their systems. The first tool, ShiViz, lets developers visualize, explore, and query logged distributed system executions. The second tool, DInv, semi-automatically identifies the variables that comprise the distributed state of a system, and infers likely data invariants that summarize the observed concrete distributed state values.