The Falcon Monitoring and Steering System
Falcon is 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
The Bigger Picture
Falcon is 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 Projects
Jeffrey Vetter is working extensivly in the area of computational
steering and has developed a steering toolkit called
Progress which is
a sibling to the FALCON toolkit.
Related Papers
- Falcon:
On-line Monitoring and Steering of Parallel Programs, Weiming Gu,
Greg Eisenhauer and Karsten Schwan, to appear in Concurrency: Practice
and Experience.
href="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/systems/papers/schwan/Eisenhauer97DE.ps.gz">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) .
People
The people currently involved in the Falcon project in some form are:
This page is maintained by
Greg Eisenhauer
Last Modified February 19, 1998.