SBIR Phase I: Software Visualization of Parallel Programs with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will establish the feasibility of a software visualization tool that extracts and transforms data about the structure and behavior of parallel programs into Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) files. These files will provide a virtual world that a programmer can browse and interact with to better understand the parallel program's performance. The VRML representation provides a standard and portable way of displaying an interactive three-dimensional environment that can include large amounts of performance and program structure information in an intuitive way. The research will investigate methods of using this powerful representation method to best advantage for software performance analysis of large complex parallel software systems. This tool will provide users with a new perspective on parallel programs and their behavior. The broader impact of this proposed activity will be the availability of a tool that will be very useful to programmers of high-performance systems. Anyone who is trying to understand and improve the performance of his or her large parallel programs will benefit from this project. The tool will be of direct commercial interest to all users of parallel systems. In addition, the effective use of a virtual world data exploration paradigm for abstract data such as parallel computer performance information may lead to other commercial applications to help understand large database performance and web usage statistics, for example.