Parallel program debugging using scalable visualization

The paper describes methods and tools for debugging parallel programs by visualization and animation of the execution behavior of the programs. Based on an evaluation and classification of existing visualization environments, the visualization and animation tool VISTOP (VISualization TOol for Parallel Systems) was developed as part of the integrated tool environment TOPSYS (TOols for Parallel SYStems) for programming distributed memory multiprocessors. VISTOP supports the interactive online visualization of message passing programs based on various views, in particular, a process graph based concurrency view for detecting synchronization and communication bugs.<
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