Exploratory visualization of distributed computations: a case study

Exploratory visualization is an approach for helping users learn about distributed computations without requiring users to examine source code. Instead, visualizations provide intuition about the program's behavior and serve as an interface through which the programs are controlled. We have developed an exploratory visualization system with the goals of providing an intuitive and user-friendly user interface and developing an infrastructure that minimizes perturbation. We present a case-study to describe how a naive user can interact with the system to learn about and experiment with the running computation.