1 - For concurrent and parallel programs, how does one determine what is "important" enough to show information about?
2 - If one does record information from these programs to run, won't it necessarily change how the program runs, thus resulting in biased data?
1. Visualization of parallel program execution seems obviously useful to students and practitioners , because parallel execution is NOT easy to understand. Why are'nt these tools more widely used? What do people use?
2. Has anyone done emprical testing to find out if visualization of parallel programs helps students learn or practitioners debug parallel programs better or faster?
1. People doing parallel programming usually are very interested in system resources usage. How about visualizing caching or disk arrays usage besides overall processors and memory usage?
2. How well can users interactively and dynamically change the variables being displayed during the viz?
1. One of the many challenges in parallel performance visualization is the artificial aspects of parallel computation. Is there any effective solution to minimize it?
2. The use of automatically parallelizing compilers may ease some of the burdens of programming. Will this automatic parallelization obscure the relationship between source code constructs and performance? And why?
1. I understand that the viz techniques presented in papers are really helpful in terms of keeping track of program execution and performance evaluation. But since not much detailed info. about execution can be illustrated right now, is it efficient in real time debugging ?
2. In papers, they mentioned on-line, off-line analysis, feedback and optimization, etc. That would be very useful for system development. Is there any specific example about this usage?
1. Even though the visualization techniques are for visualizing parallel computations, wouldn't sequential programmers benefit from many of these visualizations involving message passing and events as well?
2. What debugging tools are currently being used for parallel programmers. In my OS class, we aren't using any specialized tools at all.
1. Chapter 23, page 350, Figure 1 describes an interesting model for performance visualization. But, it would be helpful to have an example some of the boxes. For example, what is an example of a Performance Visual Abstraction that is "unconstrained by the limitations of any particular graphics environment." Is this simply a description of a geometric object or is it more abstract?
2. Chapter 23, page 361, Figure 4. This is more of an observation than a question, but it seems like the "Kiviat tube" view could be enhanced by providing a "cursor" for the user to slide down the time access. At each section of tube, a conventional Kiviat diagram (inset) could be shown.