POET - TARGET-SYSTEM INDEPENDENT VISUALIZATIONS OF COMPLEX DISTRIBUTED-APPLICATION EXECUTIONS

Designing and implementing a visual debugger for distributed programs is a significant challenge. Distributed applications are often large a nd frequently exhibit a high degree of complexity. Consequently, a deb ugger must address problems of complexity and scale in at least two wa ys, First, appropriate user interfaces should allow a user to manage t he vast amount of information typically obtained from distributed exec utions, Second, the tool itself, in handling this information, should be implemented efficiently, providing a user with reasonable response times for interactive use, Our research efforts, concentrating on thes e problems, have led to the development of Poet, a tool for the collec tion and presentation of event-based traces of distributed executions. Poet makes as few assumptions as possible about characteristics that must be possessed by all target environments, Information describing e ach target environment is placed in configuration files, allowing a si ngle set of Poet executables to be used for all target environments, C omparing Poet's performance to XPVM, the standard visualization tool f or PVM executions, reveals that this target-system independence does n ot impose a performance penalty.