VPMT: A simple visual performance monitoring system for a large-scale of transputer networks

In this paper we develop a simple software monitoring system VPMT (Visual Performance Monitoring System for a Large-Scale of Transputer Networks) which can observe behaviors of any parallel program, written in Occam 2, running on a large-scale of Transputer parallel computers. Our VPMT system supports the monitoring and visualization of user's parallel programs being executed on Transputers with several interconnection networks including two-dimensional mesh, torus, trees and so on. Much meaningful data and experiences have been obtained for various applications. It is seen that our VPMT system has small perturbations on monitored programs and can be easily transported to other Transputer systems for its implementation. We give an overview of our VPMT system and show its effectiveness by presenting an application example based on processor-farm implementation to 2-D mesh-connected Transputers. VPMT implementations to other Transputer systems which have been designed for parallel programming practice in computer science course are also discussed.