The ultimate goal is to allow a user unfamiliar with an application to pose questions and learn the answers through visual interactions without the need to ever inspect the source code of the computation. In this approach, the state of the running distributed computation is viewed as a distributed database. Key features include the use of queries as a device for searching the state space of the distributed computation, visual presentation techniques borrowed from program animation, and the ability to navigate through the state space using visual interactions. Persistent queries enable continuous visual monitoring of the state of a distributed computation.
All views correspond to globally consistent snapshots of the computation.
The project will produce the first implementation of Exploratory Visualization which will provide a uniform interface for learning about distributed applications that employ the PVM library. In the course of development, contributions will be made to monitoring and snapshot algorithms, graphical representation forms and ways to combine them, and the visual query language. Our efforts so far have been concentrated on the monitoring process. We developed several new algorithms and implemented them within the PVM environment. This enables us to vary the temporal granularity of the monitoring process and leads to novel steering capabilities, e.g., consistent global updates of the application state.