Parallel Activity Roadmaps

This paper introduces parallel roadmaps of activities for debugging and monitoring of parallel programs. Such roadmaps are especially useful in systems that employ dynamic parallelism, with activities being created and terminating during execution. Parallel roadmaps are a central feature of the mkmonitor program development environment. This environment is oriented towards the logical structure of parallel programs, in terms of the activities that compose them. Consistent with this approach, its frontend is machine independent and is driven only by the types of defined events (activity creation and termination, blocking for synchronization, etc.). Nevertheless, some of its tools may also display hardware system structure. By providing a set of coordinated interactive tools, mkmonitor allows users to exploit these apparently naive, but powerful visual constructs. The reader is forewarned that the static, disconnected black and white pictures don't do justice to interaction with the live system. A video tape shown at the conference, and available upon request, is a closer approximation