Visualization and Analysis of Parallel Dataflow Execution with Smart Traces

Most performance analysis tools focus on presenting an overload of details, with little application-dependent structure, and predefined statistical summaries. This makes the complex relations present in a parallel program not directly recognisable to the user, making the task of identifying performance issues more costly in both time and effort. In this work we investigate the requirements to create visualisations of execution traces of parallel programs modelled as dataflows. We propose the Smart Trace (ST) concept, to encode the structure of the data, and guide the construction of specialised visualizations. A visualization tool can then leverage the relationships in the data to automate a given analysis task. We show with examples the power and flexibility of visualisations we can create to address specific questions formulated about the analysis of the data, with emphasis in parallel dataflow traces.