Selective interpretation as a technique for debugging computationally intensive programs

As part of Rice University's project to build a programming environment for scientific software, we have built a facility for program execution that solves some of the problems inherent in debugging large, computationally intensive programs. By their very nature such programs do not lend themselves to full-scale interpretation. In moderation however, interpretation can be extremely useful during the debugging process. In addition to discussing the particular benefits that we expect from interpretation, this paper addresses how interpretive techniques can be effectively used in conjunction with the execution of compiled code. The same implementation technique that permits interpretation to be incorporated as part of execution will also permit the execution facility to be used for debugging parallel programs running on a remote machine.