TOM -: Efficient monitoring infrastructure for multithreaded programs

Multithreading is an efficient and powerful solution for parallel programming. However, multithreaded programming is difficult and there are few tools that support the development of multithreaded applications. Even fewer or no tools introduce portable concepts to deal with threads on many platforms. In this paper, we describe the TOM monitoring infrastructure for multithreaded applications. The key concept of TOM are Application Monitors which are additional monitoring threads in the monitored application. The concept of Application Monitors allows efficient and portable solutions to the most important problems in thread monitoring. We describe the current implementation of TOM with a focus on Application Monitors. In addition, we provide a case study implementation of fast breakpoints based on these Application Monitors.