Summary of Work Completed 2 Xgecko

1 Task Description Performance is a central issue in the development of (high-performance) parallel systems. The study and analysis of performance is, however, a diicult task. The parallel software engineer (PSE) needs, therefore, tools to support this activity. These tools usually make use of some form of visual notation in order to simplify the presentation of the statistics and the parallel application behaviour. One of the objective of the Visualisation Task was to investigate and develop performance visualisation tools. In order to simplify the performance analysis, the PSE needs to focus on particular aspects of the system. So, the tools should present a \multi-view" approach where the statistics are represented and grouped in diierent ways. Unfortunately, a single tool will not be able to attend every user's needs. A solution, therefore, is to allow the statistics to be possibly presented by various tools. XGecko is basically an X version of Gecko, a graphical package to present diagrams in colour that bring to life the statistics output by Transimm2]. Transim is a CASE tool used in the design of parallel algorithms 3]. It functions as a performance prediction tool, and a rapid prototyping tool. Transim, and consequently Gecko, is mainly applicable to loosely coupled medium grain machines { more speciically those consisting of transputers connected with Inmos links. The internal model is based on the transputers T800 family. Gecko version 1.10 7], which runs on the Sunview windowing system, has been ported to run on the X windowing system using Motif. XGecko is the name given to the ported version. In addition, a few changes have been made on XGecko. XGecko is designed to deal with static medium grained parallelism. This means that it represents the top level of parallelism only. Transient, or nested processes cannot be displayed. The les generated by Transim, or other tools, are comprised of descriptions of the users model. These descriptions contain details about the hardware and software topologies, names of processes, and most importantly the concept of \activity". Activity is how much work a particular process/processor does over a particular time period, according to the execution or simulation. In XGecko, the topologies are represented by shape, and activities are represented by colour. As a series of activities are produced over the entire run of the execution or simulation, XGecko is able to display an animation representing the colour of all 81