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3.6 Visualization

The local host can generate informations about the dynamic behaviour of the distributed system. These informations are inferred from messages that are received from the other machines, and therefore they might be delayed. There are two possibilities for the visualization of these informations:

  1. Online Visualization: It opens a window of desired size, which displays the execution status of all connected machines for the last period of time. In the upper half of the window, it is shown for each machine whether it is active or not (a horizontal line indicates that the corresponding machine is executing a task). In the lower half of the window, a diagram is shown that indicates how many machines are active at each moment (see Figure 3.6).
    Online visualization
     
  2. Post-Execution Visualization: During a distributed session, a tracefile with the relevant events can be generated. After the session is ended, the following call from the command line:
    java visual.Main filename start end width height

    will generate some files, each of them containing a diagram of dimension width×height millimeters that visualizes some aspects of the program's runtime behavior, for the interval between the labeled moments start and end. The generated files are the following:

    The numbers at the bottom of each diagram denote the range of the visualization time in milliseconds. The vertical dashed lines represents execution labels. There are two predefined labels, initialize and terminate, but the user can define at any time of the execution other labels. These labels can be used for restricting the visualization range.

Commands for visualization:

  • VisualizeD: Create a Visualization Window
  • TraceD: Create a Trace File
  • LabelD: Create a Label

  • Maintained by: Cleo Pau
    Last Modification: July 5, 2000

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