PerfVis-Home

Performance Visualization
for
Parallel Programs


Viewers

Over the years, many viewers have been developed for postmortem performance visualization. The following list has all the viewers arranged in the reverse chronological order of when they were being developed.

Jumpshot

Jumpshot is a Java-based visualization tool for doing postmortem performance analysis. Using Java instead of Tcl/Tk (that was used in some of the older visualization tools) improves the portability, maintainability and functionalities of the tools. There are several iterations of the tool:

Jumpshot-4

Jumpshot-4 is the latest viewer and is a total redesign of the graphical tool for SLOG-2. The new scalable logfile format allows the viewer to provide functionalities never made possible before. Level-of-detail support through preview drawables which provides high-level abstraction of the details without reading in huge amount of data into the graphical display engine. New Jumpshot allows seamless scrolling from the begining till the end of logfile at any zoom-level. In addition, new functionlities like dragged-zoom, instant zoom in/out, grasp and scroll, easy vertical expansion of timeline as well manipulation of timelines are available in both Timeline and Histogram modules. The new Legend table provides a central control for both the Timeline and Histogram modules and makes manipulation of drawable categories easy. A new search/scan facility is provided to locate the hard-to-find objects in very large logfile. Combined with special preview state display option and disabling of non-MPI states in Legend table, graphical analysis of MPI overhead in user MPI applications becomes easy. The new viewer also provides an integrated Logfile Convertor for all the known SLOG-2 convertible trace formats, like CLOG, CLOG-2, RLOG, and UTE, and it attempts to conform to the standard Look and Feel that is expected by most users.

For more detailed discussion of Jumpshot-4 and its features, see Jumpshot-4 User's Guide [ PDF]. The new Jumpshot for SLOG-2 is available through slog2sdk or slog2rte.

The following 2 images illustrate how dragged-zoom (bounded by a pair of white lines) reveals the details of preview drawables.

Jumpshot-4-zooming

Jumpshot-4-zoomed

Left click on the image to see the details.

Jumpshot-3

Jumpshot-3 was designed based on the experience of Jumpshot-2 and the requirement of visualization scalability but was rewritten using Java-1.1 and Swing-1.1.1 to read SLOG-1 log format. Using Swing-1.1.1 instead of Swing-1.0.3 was an effort to make Jumpshot-3 more portable. As of now, Jumpshot-3 can be compiled in JDK-1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. It is NOT possible for Jumpshot-2. Jumpshot-3 is able to achieve reasonable graphical performance when viewing gigabyte logfiles. This demonstrates that the path toward scalable performance visualization through data scalability taken by SLOG-1 is right. Here is a picture of Jumpshot-3 in action. The small winodw in the lower left-hand corner of the picture is the preview of whole logfile. The preview which provides a summary of all the activities in the logfile allows users to select a time period to view. The big window behind the preview is the timeline window that describes the selected segment of the logfile in details. For an introduction to the Jumpshot-3, see the Tour for Jumpshot-3. There is also a paper on the role of SLOG-1/Jumpshot-3 in the AIX's UTE environment.

Jumpshot-3 is distributed under the viewers package in MPE which is also distributed under MPICH. The package can be located in mpe/viewers/jumpshot-3 or in mpich/mpe/viewers/jumpshot-3.

Jumpshot-3

If you are interested in how Jumpshot-3 works, here is an demo applet for Jumpshot-3. The applet requires Java-2 plug-in installed in your web browser. The applet is not currently accessible outside the firewall of lab..

Jumpshot-2

Jumpshot-2 is a performance-enhanced rewrite of Jumpshot-1 for CLOG. It is based on Java-1.1 and Swing-1.0.3. For a CLOG file up to several megabytes, Jumpshot-2 represents a big improvement over Jumpshot-1. However, Jumpshot-2 suffers severe performance problems when the CLOG file becomes large(~10 MB). For more detailed information about the features and use of the viewer, see section Using Jumpshot of the jumpshot-2 paper.

Jumpshot-2 is distributed under the viewers package in MPE, which is also distributed under MPICH. The package can be located in the directory mpe/viewers/jumpshot-2 or mpich/mpe/viewers/jumpshot-2.

Jumpshot-1

Jumpshot-1 was the first version of Java-based postmortem performance visualization tools for CLOG. It was written based on Java-1.0 and AWT. Because of its poor performance, it has never been widely used.

Nupshot

Nupshot is a performance-enhanced version of Upshot. Part of the Tcl code has been rewritten in C to boost the graphic performance. But because of this mixture of programming languages, the package requires a specific version of Tcl/Tk in order to be compiled. Here is a related paper.

It is NOT being supported anymore. It is still distributed under MPE. It is located at mpe/profiling/nupshot.

Upshot

Upshot is an X-based visualization tool for doing postmortem analysis of an ALOG file. For more information, see the User's Manual for Upshot or the paper

The current version is written in Tcl/Tk and is distributed under the viewers package in MPE, which is also distributed under MPICH. It is located under directory mpe/viewers/upshot or mpich/mpe/viewers/upshot.


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