A visualization and control environment for parallel program debugging

A parallel debugging environment which provides a detailed high-level overview of the complex dynamic behavior of a parallel program execution is described. It is currently in use for parallel extensions of Common Lisp and C++ with explicit coarse grain parallelism and consists of visualizers related to the language´s parallelism constructs as well as a multi-window user interface. The visualizers are constructed to give as much information as possible about the state of the respective process/mailbox/critical section at a glance. The process tree visualizer is also the graphical interface to a powerful program control mechanism. The flexible event based approach facilitated a modular and language independent design of the environment which can easily be adopted to visualize and debug other parallel languages with similar and new constructs