Visualization and debugging in a heterogeneous environment

The authors' experiences with visualization and debugging of parallel virtual machine (PVM) applications and two of the tools they have devised to facilitate these tasks are described. One of the tools is a graphical monitoring package called Xab that can visually display PVM activities inside an application running across a network. The other is a graphical programming environment called Hence, which helps the user write, compile, execute, and trace heterogeneous distributed programs. The authors discuss their early work, the present research, and the future directions of these experimental projects