Vista: a framework for instrumentation system design for multidisciplinary applications

This paper presents a framework, called Vista, for designing instrumentation systems (ISs) for various applications that use distributed computing systems. We define an instrumentation system as a collection of modules and functions used for collecting data from concurrent processes executed on various nodes across the network. Based on our generic model of an IS, the Vista framework provides various abstract and base classes that help a user to quickly configure an IS for a particular application domain. Vista library is built on top of various operating system services to provide various convenience functions to collect and forward the instrumentation data. The design of this framework is hierarchical to address diverse user needs. We present the application of this framework to various practical data collection and management problems