Toward Flexible Control of the Temporal Mapping from Concurrent Program Events to Animations

As parallel and distributed computers become more widely available and used, the already important process of understanding and debugging concurrent programs will take on even greater importance. We believe that visualization can help in the process. In this paper we discuss heretofore unaddressed issues in the visualization of concurrent programs, and present the Animation Choreographer. The Animation Choreographer allows users to view, manipulate, and explore the set of alternate feasible orderings of the program execution under study, both through the Choreographer interface and in the context of the selected visualizations, thus providing the user with a variety of temporal perspectives on the computation.