We have a project currently underway that attempts to use 3D workstations to provide insight into programs, their structure and their execution, through the use of a variety of user-definable displays. We offer a variety of different presentation styles and utilize a variety of different layout methods and heuristics. This paper describes the underlying engine that we have developed to support this range of presentations.

Parallel and distributed programming is intrinsically more difficult than sequential programming, yet few effective tools or methodologies have been developed to help programmers understand the behavior of their parallel programs. Browsing source code and tracing program output are tedious and often ineffective approaches for parallel program understanding. Program visualization, which relates a program's behavior to the programmer's model of the system's components and interactions, has been shown to be a novel and highly effective approach to program and algorithm comprehension. Extending and adapting program visualization to parallel programming can aid comprehension of the complex concurrent events and transitions that occur in parallel programs. We are defining a model for the capture and display of parallel program events and transitions, based upon the path-transition paradigm for animation, and partial ordering of events. Using this model, we are developing a prototype for vis...

The general term program visualization refers to graphical views or illustrations of the entities and characteristics of computer programs. This term along with many others including data structure display, program animation, algorithm animation, etc., have been used inconsistently in the literature, which has led to confusion in describing systems providing these capabilities. In this paper we present a scaled characterization of program visualization terms along aspect, abstractness, animation, and automation dimensions. Rather than placing existing systems into hard-and-fast categories, we focus on unique and differentiating aspects across all systems. Keywords: program visualization, algorithm animation, software understanding 1 Introduction A visualization tool provides graphical views of the entities and characteristics of a computer system or program. The purpose of such a visualization tool is stated nicely by Myers, et. al.: "Human information processing is clearly optimized...

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this thesis.