The following article is presented on the CNRS-NSF workshop on
"Environments and Tools For Parallel Scientific Computing",
Saint-Hilaire du Touvet, France, 7-8 Sep. 1992.
The proceedings will be published by the "Parallel computing series"
of Elsevier Science Publishers.

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   Standardization of Event Traces Considered Harmful
                            or
       Is an Implementation of Object-Independent
  Event Trace Monitoring and Analysis Systems Possible?

Bernd Mohr
Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg
IMMD 7
Martensstr. 3
D-8520 Erlangen
Germany

email: m...@immd7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de

Abstract. Programming non-sequential computer systems is hard!
Many tools and environments have been designed and implemented
to ease the use and programming of such systems. The majority
of the analysis tools is event-based and uses event traces for
representing the dynamic behavior of the system under investigation,
the object system. Most tools can only be used for one special
object system, or a specific class of systems such as distributed
shared memory machines. This limitation is not obvious because
all tools provide the same basic functionality.

This article discusses approaches to implementing object-independent
event trace monitoring and analysis systems. The term object-independent
means that the system can be used for the analysis of arbitrary
(non-sequential) computer systems, operating systems, programming
languages and applications. Three main topics are addressed:
object-independent monitoring, standardization of event trace
formats and access interfaces and the application-independent
but problem-oriented implementation of analysis and visualization
tools. Based on these approaches, the distributed hardware monitor
system ZM4 and the SIMPLE event trace analysis environment were
implemented, and have been used in many 'real-world' applications
throughout the last three years. A summary of the experiences
and results obtained from using the ZM4/SIMPLE tools is given.
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This article is available on

     host: faui79.informatik.uni-erlangen.de [131.188.47.79]
directory: ~ftp/pub/doc
     file: cnrs-nsf.ps.Z

The directory contains also other articles and documentation files in PostScript
format (compressed) about the ZM4, SIMPLE, and PEPP environment. For abstracts,
see the file "README+abstracts".

In case of any problem or question feel free to send a mail to:

  m...@immd7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de