Visual debugging of data and operations for concurrent programs

Symmetric multiprocessor systems (SMPs) are the desktop systems of the future. As they become more widely used, application developers will need to make better use of them. Merely providing threading will be insufficient. Companies will need to provide applications that parallelize portions of code and use the processors in SMPs to their full extent. This will have a much more dramatic effect on improving performance. Before this can be achieved however, tools must be developed which aid programmers, who may have little or no experience in programming parallel systems, to debug and performance tune their applications. Our goal is to improve the technology available through interactive computational steering and to develop techniques that will be valuable for all types of concurrent systems not just SMPs. This will be done through integrated operation visualization, data highlighting, interactive computational steering, and by concentrating on the data in a parallel system rather than on the processors or code