A survey of parallel program performance evaluation techniques using visualization and virtual reality

Performance tuning parallel programs is a challenging, often frustrating, endeavor. Many tools exist to assist in this area, most using text and 2D visualization to try and explain what is happening in an executing program. This paper summarizes several commonly used techniques for visualizing running parallel programs, with examples. These tools are an excellent resource, but still suffer from scalability limitations. The second part of this paper presents a proposed method for interacting with these types of visualizations in a virtual environment.