Towards Monitoring in Parallel and Distributed Environments

Rapid technology transitions and growing complexity in parallel and distributed systems make software development in these environments increasingly difficult. Therefore, among other CASE-tools, software developers and users need powerful tools that are able to gather information from running applications as well as to dynamically manipulate with their executions. To connect multiple tools to the running application, online monitoring systems that integrate common tools functionality and provide synchronization among multiple requests are developed. This paper presents and compares three monitoring systems developed at LRR-TUM München which address different programming paradigms. OMIS/OCM is aimed at message passing systems, CORAL at distributed shared memory (DSM) paradigm and MIMO at distributed object computing (DOC). Although our monitoring systems are aimed at different programming paradigms they are based on many similar concepts and solutions. In addition, monitoring features that are specific to the particular programming paradigm are pointed out.