Paravis: A Library For Visualizing And Debugging Parallel Applications

This paper presents ParaVis, a visualization library designed to aid programmers' understanding of their parallel programs and to help them identify bugs with parallelization. ParaVis is particularly targeted for programmers who are first learning parallel programming or learning a new parallel language. It provides easy-to-use C and C++ interfaces to create 2D animations of parallel computation that help programmers understand parallel data decomposition patterns. These visualizations are also helpful in illustrating errors in parallel programs. Additionally, because students often find visualization fun, the use of our library often results in students developing interesting extensions to problems, thus promoting a deeper understanding and richer experience with parallel computing. Currently we provide support and sample implementations for pthreads, OpenMP, CUDA, and sequential applications. To test its effectiveness for parallel computing education, we deployed ParaVis for lab assignments in both intermediate and upper level courses. We present example applications, and evaluate the use of the library across our undergraduate CS curriculum.