VISPUTER - A GRAPHICAL VISUALIZATION TOOL FOR PARALLEL PROGRAMMING

Designing parallel programs for message-passing systems is not an easy task. Difficulties arise largely due to human limitations in identify ing relationships between simultaneously executed program components, or processes, and between the data computed by these processes. This p aper presents a parallel program visualization tool, Visputer, that pr ovides the ability to graphically design and edit message-passing prog rams written in Occam2, configure parallel processes onto a multi-tran sputer network and visualize the execution of programs. The textual ve rsions of programs and network configurations are automatically genera ted by Visputer based on program and network graphs, and then statical ly analysed for their performance and communication patterns. Animatio n of program execution is achieved by instrumenting the original progr am with event collecting code. The event collection method maintains p rogram behaviour and imposes little performance impact on the original program.