An Open Interface for the On-Line Monitoring of Parallel and Distributed Programs

Abstract

The on-line monitoring interface specification (OMIS) pro vides means for developing more powerful interoperable and portable tool environments for parallel and distributed systems. It specifies the interaction between any tool and a monitoring system that is responsible for observing and manipulating the programs' execution. This well- defined interface makes it possible to concurrently use several tools of possibly different developers with the same program run and to port tools onto various target architec tures and software environments. As a starting point, the research group at LRR-TUM is designing an OMIS com pliant monitoring system (OCM) for Parallel Virtual Machines (PVM) to run on workstation clusters. Tool de velopers can use this implementation to attach their own on-line tools to the system.