The On-line Monitoring Interface Specification (OMIS) aims at defining an open interface for connecting on-line software development tools to parallel programs running in a distributed environment. Interactive tools like debuggers and performance analyzers and automatic tools like load balancers are typical representatives of the considered class of tools. The current situation is characterized by the fact that tools either follow the off-line paradigm by only having access to trace data and not to the running program or else they are on-line oriented but suffer from the following deficiencies: they do not support interoperability in the sense that different tools can be used simultaneously --- not even tools from the same developer. Furthermore, no uniform environment exists where the same tools can be used for parallel programs running on different target architectures. A reason for this situation can be found in a lack of systematic development of monitoring systems, i.e. systems wh...

. The OMIS project aims at defining a standard interface between tools for parallel systems and monitoring systems. Monitoring systems act as mediators between tools and the parallel program running on some target architecture. Their task is to observe and manipulate the program according to the tools' commands. A standardized interface will allow different research groups to develop tools that can be used concurrently with the same program. OCM, an OMIS compliant monitoring system, is the first implementation of such an environment. It is designed for PVM programs running on workstation clusters. This paper will give an outline of the goals of the OMIS project and describe important details of the OCM design. 1 Motivation In parallel and distributed computing, programmers are still confronted with the situation that there is a lack of support tools for their work. Specifically, when the first prototype is running, it is hard to find efficient debugging facilities to correct e.g. erro...

. The on-line monitoring interface specification OMIS provides means for developing more powerful interoperable and portable tool environments for parallel and distributed systems. It specifies the interaction between any tool and a monitoring system that is responsible for observing and manipulating the programs' execution. By having this well defined interface it is now possible to concurrently use several tools of possibly different developers with the same program run and to port tools onto various target architectures and software environments. As a starting point the research group at LRR-TUM is designing an OMIS compliant monitoring system (OCM) for PVM running on workstation clusters. Tool developers can use this implementation to attach their own on-line tools to the system. Key words. Monitoring, on-line tools, distributed systems AMS subject classifications. 68N25, 68M10 1. Motivation. The available support for parallel programming in environments with distributed memory ...

. Understanding the dynamic behavior of parallel programs is a critical issue both for debugging and for optimization. A visualization tool displaying an animated sequence of the global states the program runs through offers valuable support for this process. The paper presents the features and the implementation of VISTOP, a state based visualizer for PVM applications. It supports program flow visualization based on various views and uses an event ordering algorithm to ensure consistent visualization without requiring a global clock. 1 Introduction The complex interaction of a large number of components makes programming parallel and distributed systems a complicated and error-prone task. The dynamics supported by programming libraries like PVM can make this situation even worse, because the execution of programs where tasks (or other objects) are created and deleted during runtime can be hard to comprehend. Breakpoint-based debuggers, which are also available for parallel programs n...

The Networks of Workstations (NoW) are becoming real distributed execution platforms for scientific applications. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of these platforms makes complex the design and the optimization of distributed applications. To overcome this problem, we have developed a performance prediction tool called ChronosMix, which can predict the execution time of a distributed algorithm on parallel or distributed architecture. In this article we present the performance prediction of an NAS Benchmark program with the ChronosMix environment.

this paper we present our first approach to this problem, which followws the concept of controlled execution driven by patterns. The first implementation of this approach is currently being realized for PVM within the scope of the TOOL--SET environment [2].

this report other projects with similar goals to EDPEPPS are reviewed and their strengths and weaknesses are highlighted. 2 The HAMLET Project - ESPRIT 6290

There is a high demand for tools supporting parallel programming. These comprise several classes of tools, e.g. debuggers, performance analyzers, visualizers, etc., each class providing a well dened set of services. A well designed tool environment should support monitoring of parallel applications developed using dierent programming models and oer a wide range of tools capable of cooperating with each other. This paper presents the recent development of the OCM-based environment of on-line tools and outlines perspectives for further research. Keywords: parallel programming, monitoring, on-line tools, interoperability, MPI, OMIS. 1 Introduction Like in the case of sequential programs, tools for parallel programming support are indispensable. On-line tools need a specialized module for observing and possibly manipulating a parallel program's state, which is called a monitoring system. Usually, tools are provided with built-in monitoring modules. Each type of tools for pa...