Edge Bundling for Visualizing Communication Behavior

Abstract

To fully exploit the potential of today's computers, application developers need to design for concurrency. Along with parallel execution new performance problems emerge. Developers gain insight into application behavior by visualizing inter-process communication in timelines. They use this insight to eliminate performance bottlenecks. Timeline visualizations overlay function call structure with communication information and additional performance data. In many cases such visualizations suffer from information overload and visual clutter that complicate analysis.We address these problems by introducing techniques inspired by hierarchical edge bundling into time-based communication visualization. Our visualization combines individual messages into dominant communication paths and thereby highlights higher-level structures. Furthermore, we introduce scalable visualizations for communication profiles, which offer an alternative view on communication patterns. This work employs edge bundling at unprecedented scale to address emerging problems in timeline displays.