The monitoring of inter-process communications in distributed systems

The decomposition of an application into processes and the allocation of the latter to the available processors is one of the most crucial problems in the software design phase of message-based distributed systems. In this paper the authors describe a tool which, by monitoring the communications between processes allocated to separate processing elements, is able to provide indications on the effectiveness of the partitioning and mapping actions carried out. The authors first show, with reference to systems built with Transputer family components, the tool's structure, which is highly independent from the system interconnection network; secondly, they show how to make an initial reduction of the data gathered during the monitoring phase.