Pajé: An Extensible Environment for Visualizing Multi-threaded Programs Executions

PajE is an interactive visualization tool for displaying the execution of parallel applications where a (potentially) large number of communicating threads of various life-times execute on each node of a distributed memory parallel system. The main novelty of PajE is an original combination of three of the most desirable properties of visualization tools for parallel programs: extensibility, interactivity and scalability. This article mainly focuses on the extensibility property of PajE, ability to easily add new functionalities to the tool. PajE was designed as a data-flow graph of modular components to ease the replacement of existing modules or the implementation of new ones. In addition the genericity of PajE allows application programmers to tailor the visualization to their needs, by simply adding tracing orders to the programs being traced.

[1]  Jacques Briat,et al.  Athapascan Runtime: Efficiency for Irregular Problems , 1997, Euro-Par.

[2]  Eric Maillet,et al.  On Efficiently Implementing Global Time for Performance Evaluation on Multiprocessor Systems , 1995, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[3]  Dieter Kranzlmüller,et al.  Parallel Program Visualization with MUCH , 1996, ACPC.

[4]  Vaidy S. Sunderam,et al.  The Dual Timestamping Methodology for Visualizing Distributed Applications , 1995 .

[5]  John Stasko,et al.  Visualizing the Execution of Threads-based Parallel Programs , 1995 .

[6]  Hans-Christian Hoppe,et al.  The PALLAS Portable Parallel Programming Environment , 1996, Euro-Par, Vol. II.

[7]  Benhur de Oliveira Stein Visualisation interactive et extensible de programmes parallèles à base de processus légers. (Interactive and extensible visualization of multithreaded parallel programs) , 1999 .

[8]  Matthew Haines,et al.  On the utility of threads for data parallel programming , 1995, ICS '95.

[9]  Ian T. Foster,et al.  The Nexus Approach to Integrating Multithreading and Communication , 1996, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[10]  Hans-Wolfgang Loidl,et al.  Improving Granularity in Parallel Functional Programs: A Graphical Winnowing System for Haskell , 1994, Functional Programming.

[11]  Hans-Wolfgang Loidl,et al.  Visualising Granularity in Parallel Programs: A Graphical Winnowing System for Haskell , 1995 .

[12]  Nigel P. Topham,et al.  A Limitation Study into Access Decoupling , 1997, Euro-Par.

[13]  Jacques Chassin de Kergommeaux,et al.  Pajé, an Extensible and Interactive and Scalable Environment for Visualizing Parallel Program Executions , 2000 .

[14]  Ewing Lusk,et al.  Studying parallel program behavior with upshot , 1991 .

[15]  Message Passing Interface Forum MPI: A message - passing interface standard , 1994 .

[16]  Jacques Chassin de Kergommeaux,et al.  Interactive Visualization Environment of Multi-threaded Parallel Programs , 1997, PARCO.

[17]  D.A. Reed,et al.  Scalable performance analysis: the Pablo performance analysis environment , 1993, Proceedings of Scalable Parallel Libraries Conference.

[18]  Michael T. Heath,et al.  Visualizing the performance of parallel programs , 1991, IEEE Software.