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A formal approach to modeling expected behavior in parallel program visualizations

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 817))

Abstract

Visualizations of program execution are useful for debugging the complex behavior of parallel programs. However, the effectiveness of the visualizations is limited by how well their representations match the programmer's conceptual model of the expected program behavior. In this paper, we show that the LOTOS specification of a parallel program may be used to model expected behavior in the visualizations of the program's execution. We developed a prototype debugging environment, Panorama, to provide a framework for the modeling of expected behavior, collection of trace data, and the generation of the corresponding visualizations. We illustrate, by example, that debugging of incorrect message-passing communication is facilitated by this visualization strategy.

This work is supported in part by the NSF Grant CCR-9209873.

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Correspondence to Betty H. C. Cheng .

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Costas Halatsis Dimitrios Maritsas George Philokyprou Sergios Theodoridis

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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Sharnowski, J.L., Cheng, B.H.C. (1994). A formal approach to modeling expected behavior in parallel program visualizations. In: Halatsis, C., Maritsas, D., Philokyprou, G., Theodoridis, S. (eds) PARLE'94 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe. PARLE 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 817. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58184-7_102

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58184-7_102

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-58184-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48477-6

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