Exploratory visualization of distributed computations: a case study

Exploratory visualization is an approach for helping users learn about distributed computations without requiring users to examine source code. Instead, visualizations provide intuition about the program´s behavior and serve as an interface through which the programs are controlled. We have developed an exploratory visualization system with the goals of providing an intuitive and user-friendly user interface and developing an infrastructure that minimizes perturbation. We present a case-study to describe how a naive user can interact with the system to learn about and experiment with the running computation