A concept visualization study of a parallel computing program

Conceptual visualization is proposed in this paper to facilitate reading and understanding parallel programs. This addresses the need to better understand high performance program codes, especially, in an environment where the codes reflect the diversity in architecture as well as in programming and language models. A relational model is developed to represent abstractions about the program. High level abstractions are termed concepts in this work. A visualization technique based on the relation hierarchy and composed of two distinct visualization models is further proposed in this paper. A study of a simple MPI parallel program is made. Various visualizations from both of the proposed visualization models are included and discussed. Combined, the visualizations provide for qualitative and quantitative aspects relating to the concepts in the given program. This study suggests that the proposed visualizations do facilitate the understanding of parallel programs.