Support for Collaboration, Visualization and Monitoring of Parallel Applications Using Shared Windows

Abstract

Results produced by a parallel application are typically collected and visualized on one display accessible to a single user. Collaboration between several researchers is usually achieved by sharing entire desktops. We have developed a system that shares windows, both from parallel applications and from desktop applications, with other users or to a wall-sized, high resolution display. Parallel applications can create several shared windows for each thread or process, enabling runtime visualization and monitoring. To aid collaboration, we provide multiple cursors for use on a display wall, allowing several researchers to interact simultaneously with windows shared by parallel and desktop applications. We measure the system's performance, and show that using shared windows for runtime visualization of the Mandelbrot computation increases the application's execution time by approximately 1.4%, while performance for sharing desktop application windows is halved as the number of users is doubled.