Performance Monitoring and Visualization of Large-Sized and Multi-Threaded Applications with the Paje Framework

Performance is a critical issue in the context of massively parallel programs. In practice, it is almost impossible to observe and understand the behavior of such programs without the assistance of automated tools which offer the program developer insights into the execution behavior of complex applications. Most of these tools are based on event-based and tracing techniques. As the size of the parallel system grows, it generates a huge size of events. Visualizing and animating gathered traces often produce a complex and non understandable diagrams and displays. Recently, the Paje visualization frameworks have been developed in our laboratory ID (Informatique et Distribution). This framework provides interactive and scalable behavioral visualizations of parallel and distributed applications. This papers presents an empirical performance monitoring and visualization study with two large scale applications (JonAS (200.000 LOCI) and Jboss (400.000 LOC)). We have developed an event-based tracing framework for large scale applications monitoring. We use Paje framework to observe and visualize a large amount of harvested events.