The Falcon Monitoring and Steering System

Falcon was a set of tools that collectively support on-line program monitoring and steering of parallel and distributed applications. There are four major conceptual components of Falcon:

a monitoring specification mechanism, which consists of a low-level sensor specification language and a high level view specification language
mechanisms for on-line information capture and analysis
mechanisms for program steering
an associated system for the construction and use of graphical displays of program information

Features of Falcon

Application specific monitoring.
Low monitoring latency and perturbation.
Configurable run-time monitoring mechanisms.
Easy-to-use default monitoring and graphical displays for all applications.
Graphical user interface for instrumentation and run-time manipulation

FALCON Release Information

The Bigger Picture

Falcon was part of a larger project to create Distributed Laboratories. Much of Falcon's functionality in terms of event transport in a heterogenous environment and event filtering and processing is built upon DataExchange and PBIO

Related Papers

Falcon: On-line Monitoring and Steering of Parallel Programs, Weiming Gu, Greg Eisenhauer and Karsten Schwan, in Concurrency: Practice and Experience.
DataExchange: High Performance Communication in Distributed Laboratories, Greg Eisenhauer, Beth Schroeder, Karsten Schwan, Vernard Martin and Jeff Vetter, Accepted for publication at the Ninth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS'97), October 1997.
Online Displays of Parallel Programs: Problems and Solutions, Greg Eisenhauer, Weiming Gu, Eileen Kraemer, Karsten Schwan and John Stasko, accepted for publication, Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA'97).
From Interactive High Performance Programs to Distributed Laboratories: A Research Agenda, Greg Eisenhauer, Beth Schroeder and Karsten Schwan, Proceedings of the SPDP'96 Workshop on Program Visualization and Instrumentation, October 1996.
Framework for Collaborative Steering of Scientific Applications, Beth Schroeder, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, Jeremy Heiner, Vernard Martin, Song Szou, Jeffrey Vetter, Ray Wang, Fred Alyea, Bill Ribarsky and Mary Trauner, Science Information Systems Newsletter, IV(40), pp. 19-23, 1997.
Opportunities and Tools for Highly Interactive Distributed and Parallel Computing, Greg Eisenhauer, Weiming Gu, Thomas Kindler, Karsten Schwan, Dilma Silva and Jeffrey Vetter, chapter in Parallel Computer Systems: Performance Instrumentation and Visualization, Rebecca Koskela and Margaret Simmons, editors, ACM Press, 1996.
From Interactive Applications to Distributed Laboratories, Beth Schroeder, Greg Eisenhauer, Jeremy Heiner, Vernard Martin, Karsten Schwan, and Jeffrey Vetter, Submitted to IEEE Journal of Parallel and Distributed Technology, October 1996. Pre-publication access.
The DataExchange Library , Greg Eisenhauer and Beth Schroeder, Tech Report GIT-CC-96-17, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
Case Study: An Integrated Approach for Steering, Visualization, and Analysis of Atmospheric Simulations , Yves Jean, Thomas Kindler, William Ribarsky, Weiming Gu, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, and Fred Alyea, In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 95. Also available as Technical Report GIT-GVU-95-15, Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
Falcon: On-line Monitoring and Steering of Parallel Programs, Weiming Gu, Greg Eisenhauer and Karsten Schwan, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems November 1994, revised September 1995.
Opportunities and Tools for Highly Interactive Distributed and Parallel Computing, Greg Eisenhauer, Weiming Gu, Thomas Kindler, Karsten Schwan, Dilma Silva and Jeffrey Vetter, In Proceedings of The Workshop On Debugging and Tuning for Parallel Computing Systems, Chatham, MA, October, 1994. Also available as Tech Report GIT-CC-94-58 or ( GIT-CC-94-58 in color ), College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
Portable Self-Describing Binary Data Streams, Greg Eisenhauer, Technical Report GIT-CC-94-45, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
Falcon -- Toward Interactive Parallel Programs: The On-line Steering of a Molecular Dynamics Application, Greg Eisenhauer, Weiming Gu, Karsten Schwan and Niru Mallavarupu, In Proceedings of The Third International Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-3), San Francisco, August 1994. IEEE Computer Society. An early version of this paper is also available as technical report GIT-CC-94-08, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
Falcon: On-line Monitoring and Steering of Large-Scale Parallel Programs. Techical Report GIT-CC-94-21, Weiming Gu, Greg Eisenhauer, Eileen Kraemer, Karsten Schwan, John Stasko, Jeffrey Vetter and Nirupama Mallavarupu, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280. To appear in Proceedings of Frontiers 95, April 1995.
An Annotated Bibliography of Interactive Program Steering, Weiming Gu, Jeffrey Vetter, and Karsten Schwan, SIGPLAN Notices 29(9):140-8. Also College of Computing Tech Report GIT-CC-94-15 (abstract) .

Status

Falcon per se is no longer an active research project. Our work in program monitoring and steering has resulted in the creation of next-generation systems such as MOSS, dQUOB, and ECho.

This page is maintained by

Greg Eisenhauer
Last Modified February 22, 2001.