PVM: a framework for parallel distributed computing
Concurrency: Practice and Experience
MIDAS: Integrated Design and Simulation of Distributed Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
ISSTA '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Complex performance measurements with NICE (Notation for Interval Combinations and Events)
Software—Practice & Experience
The Ontario telepresence project
CHI '94 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Visualizing the Performance of Parallel Programs
IEEE Software
A prototype debugger for Hermes
CASCON '92 Proceedings of the 1992 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research - Volume 1
The use of process clustering in distributed-system event displays
CASCON '93 Proceedings of the 1993 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research: software engineering - Volume 1
Trace-Based Load Characterization for Generating Performance Software Models
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Automating experimentation on distributed testbeds
Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering
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In developing distributed applications and services there is a need to be able to set up and run tests on a set of processes. The experiment might be to obtain performance data, to test the processes' behaviour, or to evaluate an application management strategy. Common requirements are • to load and run special versions of at least some of the software, often on multiple nodes of a network, • to initialize the software in a well-controlled way, so the tests may be repeatable, • to monitor execution and collect results for post-execution or real-time analysis.DECALS is a controlling framework to support the testing of distributed applications consisting of many processes on a network. There may be any number of experiments; in each experiment a set of processes is loaded on specified workstations, and each process is initialized with data for the particular experiment. The configuration of the experiment, and the data state of the processes, can be controlled down to any level of detail, as desired. The nerve center of DECALS is an "experiment controller" process which communicates with each application process through an agent which it creates on each workstation.DECALS provides global control over the running of the experiment and the collection of data. The data is collected both from probes installed in the application's source code, and from instrumented operating system primitives. The present system collects data in the form of a separate list of events for each workstation. Events are timestamped by clock values local to the workstation on which the list was made. The lists of events are adjusted for global time and merged, in a post-processing step. A mechanism is provided for handling the often troublesome problem of tracking the time differences between workstation clocks.As an example of the usefulness of DECALS, we will describe how it can be used to create a synthetic workload of processes on a network.