3 The VAMPIR Environment

Performance analysis and program optimization are often based on different categories of system views (Fig. 2, [Mue95]):

  
Figure 2: The VAMPIR visualization options

• single time system snapshots: panels that show system activities at a particular point of time;
• animation: option to look at a sequence of system snapshots to investigate the dynamic behavior;
• statistics: the component that summarizes system behavior for the time under investigation;
• time-line system view: detailed view of system activities, which are visualized on a time axis.

Each category is supported by the VAMPIR environment; the current prototype can generate traces on the Intel iPSC/860, Intel Paragon and CRAY T3D systems, whereas the product version will work for any standard-compliant MPI implementation.

For user convenience, VAMPIR provides a configuration file where user preferences (color, layout, fonts etc.) are stored between runs. This file enables the tool to come up with the exact same settings of a previous session, and different configurations may be saved and loaded at will. A detailed description of all VAMPIR features can be found in [Arn93, ArRo95, Mue95].

VAMPIR is implemented in ANSI C and uses the OSF/Motif libraries. The current implementation already supports a variety of different hardware platforms (IBM RS/6000, Sun Sparc, DEC MIPS computers (Ultrix), DEC Alpha, HP, and Silicon Graphics).