The Sounds of Parallel Programs

Abstract

Portraying the behavior of parallel programs is useful in pro8ram debuming and performance tuning. For the most part, researchers have focused on finding ways to visualize what happens during a program's execution. As an alternative to visualization, auralization can also be used to portray the behavior of parallel programs. This paper investigates whether or not sound can be used effectively t o depict dzferent events that take place during a parallel proBram's execution. In particular, we focus this discussion on distributedmemory parallel programs. Three mappings of execution behavior to sound were studied. ?'he first mapping tracks the load balance of the processors of a system. In the second mapping, the jlows-of-control of the parallel processes are mapped to related sounds. The third mapping is related t o process communication in a distributed-memory parallel program.