Evaluating trace aggregation for performance visualization of large distributed systems

Performance analysis through visualization techniques usually suffers semantic limitations due to the size of parallel applications. Most performance visualization tools rely on data aggregation to work at scale, without any attempt to evaluate the loss of information caused by such aggregations. This paper proposes a technique to evaluate the quality of aggregated representations - using measures from information theory - and to optimize such measures in order to build consistent multiresolution representations of large execution traces.