Towards a Library of Distributed Algorithms and Animations
Marina Papatriantafilou, Philippas Tsigas · 1998
As distributed algorithms may involve a large amount of data describing local state information and complex interactions between elements, it is often very di cult to achieve anunderstanding of their control ow (and performance behaviour) only from a pseudo-code description or from data streams (e.g. execution traces). This paper is on our project which constitutes a systematic e ort to explore the use of visualisation and animation aids to illuminate the key ideas of distributed protocols and algorithms. In particular, it involves: development of a database of distributed protocols and concurrent data objects implementations� availability of an animation program for each entry of the database (i.e. each protocol or concurrent object implementation), which, given the (on- or o-line) trace of any execution, it animates it in a way that demonstrates the key ideas of the respective protocol or concurrent object implementation� development of a database of network descriptions. The integrated library, Lydian, will be of big help for educational purposes, such as for teaching distributed computing, computer networks, communication protocols, operating systems � students will be able to gain a direct impression of the behaviour of the protocol and teachers will be able to illustrate concepts that can otherwise be explained concisely only in a technical paper. For the protocols and data objects implementation part we use simulation platforms for network and multiprocessor systems. Since distributed protocols are designed to execute on any type of system that can be described as a set of interconnected processing units, the use of these platforms enables the implementation of a wide range of protocols. For the creation of network descriptions and their tra c behaviour a simple and nice graphical editor was used accompanied by a set of drawing algorithms. For the animation part we use a powerful toolkit, which, like the simulation platforms, is appropriate for many di erent architectures. 1