Instrumenting parallel programs for performance visualisation

Program visualisation and execution animation are usually achieved by instrumenting the original program with event collecting code. To maintain the original program behaviour, the effect of instrumentation should be kept at a minimum. In other words, the instrumentation overhead introduced into the program should be as low as possible. This paper presents some instrumentation methods to support a visualisation tool that assists the development of message-passing parallel programs. It discusses these instrumentation methods for event collection, and reports the preliminary evaluation results of the approaches implemented in Occam2 on a multi-transputer system. Copyright