Starting Up Prism

To debug a Sun MPI program with Prism, you need to have compiled your program using one of the compilers included in either the Sun Performance WorkShop Fortran or Sun Performance WorkShop C⁺⁺/C suite of tools.

To start Prism on a Sun MPI program, use the -n option to bsub to specify how many processors you want to run on. For example,

% prism -n 4 foo

launches Prism on executable foo with four processes.

This starts up a graphical version of Prism with your program loaded. You can then debug and visualize data in your Sun MPI program.

You can also attach Prism to running processes. First determine the job id (not the individual process id), or jid, using either bsub (in LSF) or mpps (in the CRE). (See the LSF Batch User's Guide for further information about bjobs. See the Sun MPI 4.0 User`s Guide: With CRE for further information about mpps.) Then specify the jid at the command line with the -n (or -np, -c, -p) option:

% prism -n 4 foo 12345

This will launch Prism and attach it to the processes running in job 12345.

To run graphical Prism, you must be running Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 with either OpenWindows(TM) or the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), and with your DISPLAY environment variable set correctly. See the Prism 6.0 User's Guide for information.

One important feature of Prism is that it lets you debug the Sun MPI program at any level of detail. You can look at the program as a whole or at subsets of processes within the program (for example, those that have an error condition), or at individual processes, all within the same debugging session. For complete information, see the Prism 6.0 User's Guide.