Log Visualization Tool for Message-Passing Programming in Pilot

摘要

The Pilot library is aimed at novice high-performance computing (HPC) programmers and has been used for years to teach message-passing programming to undergraduates. While built on top of standard Message Passing Interface (MPI), it offers a compact application programming interface (API) based upon simple abstractions from the process/channel model of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), extensive error-checking, and an integrated deadlock detector. This work enhances Pilot with a log visualization facility adapted from MPI Parallel Environment (MPE) and Jumpshot-4. This new feature is a pedagogical tool helping beginners to understand actual run-time message-passing between processes, and a debugging tool for diagnosing logic that impedes parallelism.