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From HPCBugBase

Introduction

Welcome to HPCBugBase, an experience base for software defects (bugs) that are recurring in the domain of high performance computing (HPC). We are collecting "patterns" of functional bugs, performance bottlenecks, portability problems, bad practices, etc. in HPC applications through empirical study, so that you can access and share the information about them as easily as possible.

Since HPCBugBase is a Wiki, anyone interested can contribute to the content. We strongly encourage you to help us enrich the knowledge by submitting your thoughts and comments on the existing content or suggesting other type of defects which have not been covered yet. The simplest way to do that is to click on the "submit feedback" tab on the top of each page and fill out comments. Of course, you can directly edit the Wiki content from the "edit" tab if you are familiar with Wiki authoring. The experience base is under active development, and we appreciate suggestions about how to improve the system too.

Defect Types

The simplest way to access the content of HPCBugBase is to click on the list of defect types below. A tutorial for these defect types is available in the "Overview of HPC Defect Patterns". For other usage, see "How to use this experience base?".

Type	Sub-type	Brief Definition
Use of Language Features	---	Erroneous use of parallel language features
Space Decomposition	---	Incorrect mapping between the problem space and the problem memory space
Side-effect of Parallelization (Hidden Serialization)	I/O Hotspots	Serial constructs can cause correctness and performance defects when accessed in parallel contexts.
	Hidden Serialization in Library Functions
Synchronization	Deadlock	Incorrect/unnecessary synchronization
	Race
Performance	Load Balancing	Performance defects in parallel contexts
	Scheduling
	Failure to Exploit Locality
	Excessive Synchronization
	Communication/Computation Ratio
	Scalability Problems
	Memory Hierarchy
Memory Management	Memory Allocation	Inadequate memory management
	Memory Cleanup
Algorithm	---	Logical error
Environment	---	External issues, e.g., failure to use existing libraries
Other defect types	---	Defects that do not fall into any of the above types

Do you have comments on this classification? Click here to submit feedback.

About the project

HPCBugBase is developed and maintained by the Experimental Software Engineering Group (ESEG) at the University of Maryland, as part of the HPCS Development Time Working Group.