Poet: Target-System-Independent Visualizations of Complex Distributed Executions

A process time diagram showing the execution his tory of individual processes and the interactions be tween processes can be a very useful tool in under standing the behavior of a distributed or concurrent application Managing the size of these visualizations via suitable abstraction facilities is essential for long running and complex applications This paper de scribes Poet a tool that collects and visualizes event traces from applications running in several di erent target environments such as OSF DCE ABC SR and PVM To manage the complexity of the re sulting visualizations for non trivial executions Poet supports abstraction facilities in both the process and time dimensions These abstraction facilities enable Poet to visualize distributed executions on a number of abstraction levels To achieve target system inde pendence Poet makes as few assumptions as possi ble about characteristics that must be possessed by all target environments Information describing each target environment is placed in con guration les al lowing a single set of Poet executables to be used for all target environments