Pajé: An extensible environment for visualizing multi-threaded programs executions

Abstract

Pajé is an interactive visualization tool for displaying the execution of parallel applications where a (potentially) large number of communicating threads of various life-times execute on each node of a distributed memory parallel system. The main novelty of Pajé is an original combination of three of the most desirable properties of visualization tools for parallel programs: extensibility, interactivity and scalability. This article mainly focuses on the extensibility property of Pajé, ability to easily add new functionalities to the tool. Pajé was designed as a data-flow graph of modular components to ease the replacement of existing modules or the implementation of new ones. In addition the genericity of Pajé allows application programmers to tailor the visualization to their needs, by simply adding tracing orders to the programs being traced.