Voyeur: graphical views of parallel programs

Abstract

Voyeur is a prototype system that facilitates the construction of application-specific, visual views of parallel programs. These views range from textual views showing the contents of variables to graphical maps of the state of the computational domain of the program. These views have been instrumental in quickly detecting bugs that would have been difficult to detect otherwise.

Growing squares

“…Visualizations of causal relations in the form of such time-space diagrams are currently quite standard in visualization and debugging platforms for parallel and distributed systems, and the number of such platforms is too large to allow mentioning them all. One of the first of the new generation of visualization tools to include the time-space diagram was the Voyeur [Socha et al 1989] system, which provided a framework for defining various animation views for parallel algorithms. The TOPSYS [Bemmerl and Braum 1993] environment includes various standard concurrency visualizations integrated with the debugging and performance analysis tools of the system, with time-space visualization being one of them.…”

Retargetability and Extensibility in a Parallel Debugger

“…Therefore, some designers have created extensible tools and metatools that permit users to design their own views. Examples include Voyeur [20] and POLKA [21], which offer toolkits based on Cϩϩ for creating program views, and PARADISE [6], in which users can graphically design a view for representing the communication structure of a program.…”

Models for visualization in parallel debuggers

“…Figure 15. Algorithm animation frame, Voyeur [28] A reIated approach has been adopted in some recent tools for algorithm animation.…”

“…The Voyeur system, developed by Socha et al [28], provides several alternatives for viewing parallel program behavior in abstracted form. In Figure 15, for example, a loadbalancing algorithm is animated as a display of fishes and sharks across a grid.…”