Logical time in visualizations produced by parallel programs

Techniques that manipulate logical time in order to produce coherent animations of parallel program behavior despite the presence of asynchrony are presented. The techniques interpret program behavior in light of user-defined abstractions and generate animations based on a logical, rather than a physical, view of time. If this interpretation succeeds, the resulting animation is easily understood. If it fails, the programmer can be assured that the failure was not an artifact of the visualization. It is shown that these techniques can be generally applied to enhance visualizations of a variety of types of data as they are produced by parallel, MIMD (multiple instruction stream, multiple data stream) computations.<>