Visual-aural representations of performance for a scalable application program

Abstract

Visual and aural portrayals of parallel program execution are used to gain insight into how a program is working. The combination of portrayals in a coordinated performance environment provides the user with multiple perspectives and stimuli to comprehend complex, multidimensional run-time information. An open question for either medium is how well does it scale? That is, how effectively can it be used to represent program performance on a large parallel computer system? This paper investigates using sound in conjunction with graphics to represent the performance of a scalable application program, the SLALOM benchmark program, executed on the nCUBE 2 distributed memory parallel computer. Custom auralization software is coupled with the PICL and ParaGraph tools. The techniques and results of visually and aurally monitoring program execution on increasing numbers of processors are presented.<>