Aspects and Taxonomy of Program Visualisation

ion: program execution ! program data representation (1) Visualisation: program data representation ! pictorial representation (2) Here, abstraction takes the form of instrumentation and data collection, while visualisation comprises the last two steps of Figure 6. Abstraction merely represents the types of information or program entities which are essential in driving the final visualisation. For example, in visualising a parallel program, it can be useful to derive information on the utilisation of processors. On the other hand, visualisation is a step used to present the program entities or information in final displays. For example, a single stream of information on processor utilisation can be represented as a processor-usage profile, such as the Kiviat diagram (see Figure 3), and as a concurrency profile that shows the number or percentage of processors executing concurrently at each point in time 11 . Hardware Architecture Uniprocessor Multiprocessor Distributed Parallel Op..