Parallel Program Visualisation for a Message-Passing System

Designing parallel programs for message-passing systems is not an easy task. Difficulties arise largely due to human limitations in identifying relationships between simultaneously executed program components, or processes, and between the data computed by these processes. This paper presents a parallel program visualisation tool, Visputer, that provides the ability to graphically design and edit messagepassing programs, configure parallel processes onto a multiprocessor network and visualise the execution of programs. The textual versions of programs and network configurations are automatically generated by Visputer based on program and network graphs. Animation of program execution is achieved by instrumenting the original program with event collecting code. The event collecting method maintains program behaviour and imposes little performance impact on the original program. views. Wagner et al. developed an environment, known as TIPS [18], which integrates a performance monitoring t..