Vector time and causality among abstract events in distributed computations
Distributed Computing
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A process-time diagram showing the execution history of individual processes and the interactions between processes can be a very useful tool in understanding the behavior of a distributed or concurrentapplication. Managing the size of these visualizationsvia suitable abstraction facilities is essential for longrunning and complex applications. This paper describes Poet, a tool that collects and visualizes eventtraces from applications running in several differenttarget environments, such as OSF DCE, ABC++SR, and PVM. To manage the complexity of the resulting visualizations for non-trivial executions, Poetsupports abstraction facilities in both the process andtime dimensions. These abstraction facilities enablePoet to visualize distributed executions on a numberof abstraction levels. To achieve target-system independence, Poet makes as few assumptions as possible about characteristics that must be possessed byall target environments. Information describing eachtarget environment is placed in configuration files, allowing a single set of Poet executables to be used forall target environments.