Xab: X Analysis and deBugging for PVM programs

One of the problems in writting a PVM program is figuring out what the heck it's doing. One way to follow it is to use Xab. Xab will show you what your PVM program is doing as it's running. With Xab, every PVM call can generate an event which is sent to a monitor process and displayed in an X window.

Here we see an Xab window showing four PVM tasks and what they are up to. For example, the first task, (cholhost, 0) is running on a machine named betty. This task is doing a rcv for a message with type 16003.

Availablilty

Xab for PVM Version 2 is available from netlib. It's on netlib2.cs.utk.edu in the directory pvm/xab.

Xab3 for PVM Version 3 is available ftp. The source and some documentation, including man papges, are included int the xab3 tar file. You can also find a paper about Xab in that directory. Click here to view the postscript .

Xab3 has a lot of nice features. For instance you can adjust the level of monitoring as a program is running. We also have converters to ParaGraph and Pablo if you want to do more visualization on the tracefiles.

Questions?

If you have questions of problems using Xab send us email at:

xab@psc.edu