Monitoring and visualization in TOPSYS
Arndt Bode, Peter G. Braun · 1993
It is widely acknowledged that writing parallel programs is much more complex than writing sequential programs. This is particularly true for distributed memory multiprocessor systems and message passing programming models. Graphical representations of a program execution can increase the understanding of parallel programs. The paper describes the on-line visualization and animation system VISTOP (VISualization TOol for Parallel systems) and its use of the TOPSYS distributed monitoring system. TOPSYS (TOols for Parallel SYStems) is an integrated tool environment which aims at simplifying the usage and programming of parallel systems. It consists of several interactive development tools for specification, debugging, performance analysis and visualization. VISTOP is presented after an evaluation and classification of existing visualization environments. It supports the interactive on-line visualization of message passing programs based on various views, in particular, a process graph ba...