	SSP 1995 project summary:

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Application Engineering Tools for MPI and PUL

This project will involve a student working on extending the features of the VISPAT tool (VISualization of Performance Analysis and Tuning). The first and second versions of VISPAT targeted programs using the CHIMP and MPI libraries respectively.

This year, the student will be expected to enhance the robustness and usability of the existing tool based on user feedback, and then to extend the tool to address visualisation of MPI-based libraries that provide parallel programming paradigms, such as regular grid decomposition and task farming. EPCC's Parallel Utilites Libraries (PUL) and University of Colorado's MPI-RGL are MPI-based libraries in this area.

The student's work will be split into three parts. During the first part of the project the student will enhance the robustness and usability of the existing tool according to user feedback; this will familiarise the student with the GUI code and use of the GUI builder. The second stage will be to produce the instrumented versions of the PUL (and MPI-RGL) libraries. As the third stage the student will implement new displays and transform some of the existing ones, as follows.

New Displays
A regular domain decomposition animation display which will show the processes arranged in a grid, with emphasis on the MPI communicators participating in this grid. Colour can depict operations; alternatively arrows can be used in the 2D and 3D cases.
A task farming animation display which will show the tasks moving within the process space. Again emphasis should be placed on the communicators.
Old Displays
Statistics Display The functionality should be extended in order to depict statistics about the (PUL) function calls.
Profile Display This display should be extended to cater for (PUL) calls and implement some of the previously specified features that have been left unfinished.
Navigation Display This display should be extended to cater for (PUL) calls and implement some of the previously specified features that have been left unfinished.

Patricio Domingues worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of the project's final report is available here (146865 bytes) .

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