Visual Analytics Challenges In Analyzing Calling Context Trees

Performance analysis is an integral part of developing and optimizing parallel applications for high performance computing (HPC) platforms. Hierarchical data from different sources is typically available to identify performance issues or anomalies. Some hierarchical data such as the calling context can be very large in terms of breadth and depth of the hierarchy. Classic tree visualizations quickly reach their limits in analyzing such hierarchies with the abundance of information to display. In this position paper, we identify the challenges commonly faced by the HPC community in visualizing hierarchical performance data, with a focus on calling context trees. Furthermore, we motivate and lay out the bases of a visualization that addresses some of these challenges.