We are exploring the development and application of information visualization techniques for the analysis of new massively parallel supercomputer architectures. Modern supercomputers typically comprise very large clusters of commodity SMPs interconnected by possibly dense and often non-standard networks. The scale, complexity, and inherent non-locality of the structure and dynamics of this hardware, and the operating systems and applications distributed over them, challenge traditional analysis methods. As part of the á la carte (A Los Alamos Computer Architecture Toolkit for Extreme-Scale Architecture Simulation) team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who are simulating these new architectures, we are exploring advanced visualization techniques and creating tools to enhance analysis of these simulations with intuitive three-dimensional representations and interfaces. This work complements existing and emerging algorithmic analysis tools. In this paper, we give background on the problem domain, a description of a prototypical computer architecture of interest (on the order of 10,000 processors connected by a quaternary fat-tree communications network), and a presentation of three classes of visualizations that clearly display the switching fabric and the flow of information in the interconnecting network.
Toward automatic comparison of visualization techniques: Application to graph visualization
