The MOST immersive approach for parallel and distributed program analysis

Examining a program's state during execution is of major importance for software developers when analyzing an application for performance tuning or error detection. This demand for suitable analysis tools is further pushed by parallel and distributed programs, which process huge amounts of complex data. A solution to this problem is offered by visualization, such that even a large amount of data can be presented efficiently for the user's investigations. This paper presents an immersive approach, where monitoring and steering activities combined with virtual reality visualization components help the user to understand the behavior of running parallel and distributed programs. On the one hand, program visualization tries to induce a “feeling” for the program. On the other hand, data visualization provides a facility to display preliminary results of any kind of scientific calculations