Monitoring the T9000: the TRAPPER Approach

In this article issues of the TRAPPER monitoring system for a T9000 processor are presented. Different strategies for its realization are discussed and a concrete implementation is presented. The monitoring system is a major component of the TRAPPER programming environment. TRAPPER is based on the programming model of communicating sequential processes and supports the programming of parallel embedded systems. TRAPPER contains tools for design, mapping, visualization and optimization of parallel systems. The Designtool supports the graphical design of the parallel software structure. The Configtool supports the configuration of the target hardware and the mapping of the application onto the target hardware. The monitoring system is the heart of the environment and allows the user to observe and analyse the behaviour of the parallel application and the hardware. It records software events like interprocess communication and measures the computation and communication loads of the underlying hardware. The monitoring data is visualized by Vistool and Perftool. The Vistool animates the run-time behaviour of the application, whereas the Perftool shows the utilization of the target hardware. The first implementation of the monitoring system supports transputer-based systems of the current transputer generation (T8xx). An important issue of any monitoring system is the overhead it incurs. This has been taken into account in the implementation and the low overhead is demonstrated by measurements. Moreover, the monitoring system has been successfully ported to a T9000 prototype.