The monitoring facilities of the graphical parallel programming environment TRAPPER

TRAPPER is a graphical environment aimed to support the programming of parallel embedded systems. TRAPPER comprises components for the design, mapping, visualization and optimization of parallel applications. One goal of this article is to motivate the requirements for a monitoring system in such a graphical programming environment. Because the existing monitoring system DELTA-T already fulfils a lot of these requirements we decided to integrate it. The result of this integration is shown in detail. The main features are automatic observation of software and hardware events at different granularity, different transport strategies of the monitoring data, and a flexible programmer interface to interact with the monitor. All features may be switched on and off by the graphical user interface of TRAPPER. Measurements show the low overhead of our implementation. The monitoring system is currently being used as part of TRAPPER in several industrial automotive research applications