While I found that XMPI could be useful I found that it had several drawbacks. The first drawback is that it only works with the LAM60 MPI version, unless you use the trace feature. Also the documentation is scant at best. However they do make up for the documentation with an execellent man page that describes using XMPI very well. I would have liked to have a user guide and a tutorial to come with it. The good points is that it was very small, around 1 meg, and it did monitor the messages well. I liked the nice feature of being able to monitor particular processes. This opens a window that you can see the communicator, tag and cnt of the unreceived messages. Although the stoplight pictures that give you an overview of processes and messages at a glance, I did not find it that usefull. However, the timeline did come in very handy. As they say in the documentation this tool is excellent as a teaching aid. For use in debugging/performance uses, I think that it is usefull if message tags or communicators are wrong. But it does not have the flexibility to find the allusive problems.
Click here to view a screen shot
Reviewed by Kevin London, london@cs.utk.edu
August 23, 1996
