Title:
Integrating Visualization Support Into Distributed Systems
Integrating Visualization Support Into Distributed Systems
Authors
Topol, Brad Byer
Stasko, John T.
Sunderam, Vaidy
Stasko, John T.
Sunderam, Vaidy
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Abstract
Visualization and animation tools may become extremely important
aids in the understanding, verification, and performance tuning of
parallel computations. Presently, however, the use of visualization
has had only a limited use for enhancing parallel computation.
We hypothesize that one of the primary reasons for the
limited use of visualization tools in parallel program development is
the difficulty of acquiring the information necessary to drive the
visual display. Our approach to this impediment focuses on
integrating visualization support directly into a
distributed computing system. Central to this integration
is the addition of a logical clock that prevents the timestamps of
events from violating causality. The implementation requires the
``piggybacking'' of a negligible amount of extra header information on
system messages and the impact on performance is minimal. This
results in a system that produces useful visualizations with no extra
effort required by the applications programmer. Also integrated into
the distributed system is support which simplifies the creation of
programmer-defined, application-specific visualizations, unique to
each new parallel program developed.
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Date Issued
1994
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332561 bytes
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Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report