OCM—a monitoring system for interoperable tools
Roland Wismüller, Jög Trinitis, Thomas G. Ludwig · 1998
Existing tools can be classified into interactive vs. automatic, observing vs. manipulating, and on-line vs. ORline tools.Interactive tools (e.g.debuggers) usually offer a graphical user interface whereas automatic tools are hidden in layers close to the operating system (e.g.load balancers).Observing tools are tools that merely read and present data, e.g. program and data flow visualizers or performance analyzers, and are to be distinguished from tools that allow to manipulate a running application, e.g.computational steering and debugging tools.A crucial distinction is between on-line tools that operate while the program is running and off-line tools that run after the program has finished.Offline tools usually operate on traces generated at runtime.It should be clear that an off-line tool can never manipulate the running application and thus falls into the category of observing tools.Taking a look at existing tools one can state that: l There are more off-line tools than on-line tools.l Most tools are only available on one or very few platforms.l Different on-line tools (and their monitoring systems) can typically not be applied concurrently to the same program.lThere are no generally available integrated development environments for parallel and distributed programming.