Real-Time Animation

The third library does a simple form of real-time program animation. The MPE graphics library contains routines that allow a set of processes to share an X display that is not particularly associated with any one specific process. Our prototype uses this capability to draw arrows that represent message traffic as the program runs. An example snapshot is shown in Figure 3. Here a parallel Mandelbrot computation is proceeding, with output of the computation being drawn in one MPE window while the message pattern is being drawn in another MPE window. (In this case the manager-worker scheduling algorithm is apparent; the manager process has been stopped to take the screen dump, and animation quickly has reached the state in which every other process has completed it current task and has sent a message to the manager that it has not yet received, precisely because it has been stopped.)

  

Figure: Program Animation with the MPI Profiling interface

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