This paper describes a prototype visualization system
for concurrent and distributed applications programmed
using Erlang, providing two levels of granularity of view. Both
visualizations are animated to show the dynamics of aspects of
the computation.
At the low level, we show the concurrent behaviour of the
Erlang schedulers on a single instance of the Erlang virtual
machine, which we call an Erlang node. Typically there will be
one scheduler per core on a multicore system. Each scheduler
maintains a run queue of processes to execute, and we visualize
the migration of Erlang concurrent processes from one run queue
to another as work is redistributed to fully exploit the hardware.
The schedulers are shown as a graph with a circular layout. Next
to each scheduler we draw a variable length bar indicating the
current size of the run queue for the scheduler.
At the high level, we visualize the distributed aspects of the
system, showing interactions between Erlang nodes as a dynamic
graph drawn with a force model. Speci?cally we show message
passing between nodes as edges and lay out nodes according to
their current connections. In addition, we also show the grouping
of nodes into “s_groups” using an Euler diagram drawn with
circles
