PTLIB Review of DAQV
See the PTLIB Review of Parallel Debuggers and
Performance Analyzers which includes this evaluation of DAQV
for the review criteria and methodology as well as a comparison
with other similar tools.
Performance
- Acceptable monitoring overhead
- Yes.
- Intrusion compensation
- No.
- Acceptable response time
- Yes, the controls responded quickly.
- Memory/disk requirements
- Memory requirements are small enough to run the display on an xterm although
it did run a bit slower. Disk requirements is almost 6 megs including the
executables and documentation.
- Scalable data collection
- N/A
- Scalable data presentation
- N/A
Versatility
- Languages/programming models/
communication libaries supported
- HPF
- Runs on currently popular platforms
- SGI workstations and Power Challenge/Onyx
Solaris workstations.
- Platform dependencies isolated
- Yes.
- Support for heterogeneous environment
- Yes.
- Interacts with current or soon-to-be
standards (e.g., PVM, MPI, HPF)
- Interacts with HPF.
- Uses SDDF
- No.
- Change/customize/add new views easily
- N/A
Ease of Use
- Documentation
- Not, much documentation on it. You can get an overview from their
web page. There are a few readme files but I found the documentation
to be in-adequate.
- Ease of installation
- Installation is not bad. You must have the pghpf compiler and other that
that you are set as they send the tcl, tk libraries with it (which is nice).
- Command-line interface
- Sample command-line control and data clients are included in the distribution.
- Window-based interface
- Yes.
- GUI common look-and-feel (OSF/Motif Style Guide)
- Yes, has a good gui feel and look to it.
- Privilege-free installation
- Yes, there is no need for special privileges to
install this package.
- Reports information at source code level
- Yes, it can report the code to the source level.
- Automated instrumentation
- Yes, it can be automated or it can be done manually.
- Compile without special linking
- No.
Maturity
- Runs without crashing the monitored program
- Yes, applications don't crash due to DAQV
- Reports and recovers from error conditions
- Yes, it seems to recover from errors well.
Capabilities
- Support for multiple threads per node
- No.
- Presents different levels of abstraction,
from global to individual threads,
procedures, or data structures
- No.
- Single point control for parallel debugging
- Yes.
- Attach/detach to/from running program
- No.
- Breakpoints and data watchpoints
- Yes, you can stop at certain lines of the program.
- Program state examination
- Yes.
- Program state modification
- No, however framework has being extended to support computational steering
support in which user subroutines can be invoked via the external control client
and also change values of distributed data structures through a similar
mechanism.
- Event tracing mechanism
- No.
- Cache and memory reference tracking/display
- No.
- Remote data access pattern analysis
- N/A
- Message tracing/display
- N/A
- Input/output characterization
- N/A
- Real-time monitoring
- Yes.
- Post-mortem analysis
- No.
- Profiling at level of subprocedures and
coarse blocks
- N/A
- Utilization display
(communications/idle/IO/computation)
- N/A
- Performance prediction
- No.
- Comparisons between different runs
- No.
Other
- Commercial/research
- Research
- Cost
- Free
- Webpage
- http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~hacks/research/daqv/
- Version Date
- July 1996
- Version
- 1.0
- Libraries Required
- pghpf Version 2.0 or 2.1
tcl7.4 and tk4.0 (Included for SGI and Solaris)
Summary
DAQV is a tool for distributed array query and visualization
in HPF programs. This tool has a lot of potential, but it is not a
polished tool. This did not seem to be the main focus of this project
, but more aimed at making a tool that can be built upon. It achieves
this very well. DAQV's one feature right now is the ability to
extract the data values of distributed arrays for analysis or display.
The display they provide is bare bones, but DAQV provides ways
to to develop different displays. The documentation I thought was not
aimed as much towards the programmer but more the parallel tool developers.
DAQV does a lot for the tool developer because it supports client/server
protocols for direct interaction with executioner HPF code. Overall this
tool has lots of potential if it gets built upon.
Ratings (Worse 1 ... 5 Better)
- Performance: x
- Versatility: x
- Ease of Use: x
- Maturity: x
- Capabilities: x
- OVERALL: x
Click here to view a screen shot
Reviewed by Kevin London, london@cs.utk.edu
August 26, 1996
