Visualizing Execution Traces with Task Dependencies

Task-based scheduling has emerged as one method to reduce the complexity of parallel computing. When using task-based schedulers, developers must frame their computation as a series of tasks with various data dependencies. The scheduler can take these tasks, along with their input and output dependencies, and schedule the task in parallel across a node or cluster. While these schedulers simplify the pro-cess of parallel software development, they can obfuscate the performance characteristics of the execution of an algorithm. The execution trace has been used for many years to give developers a visual representation of how their computations are performed. These methods can be employed to visualize when and where each of the tasks in a task-based algorithm is scheduled. In addition, the task dependencies can be use