The PVM 3.4 Tracing Facility and XPVM 1.1

One of the more bothersome aspects of developing a parallel program is that of monitoring the behavior of the program for debugging and performance tuning. Often there is no intrinsic support for examining program state and dynamics in a parallel programming system, let alone a useful interface for analyzing or visualizing that information. This paper discusses an enhanced tracing facility and tracing tool for PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), a message passing library for parallel processing in a heterogeneous environment. PVM supports mixed collections of workstation clusters, shared-memory multiprocessors, and MPPs. The latest release of PVM, Version 3.4, contains a new and improved tracing facility which provides more flexible and efficient access to run-time program information. This new tracing system supports a buffering mechanism to reduce intrusion, and a more flexible trace event definition scheme which is based more directly on SDDF (Self-Defining Data Format, Reed et al). Thi..