The upcoming release of PVM, Version 3.4, will contain a new and improved tracing facility which provides more flexible and efficient access to run-time program information. This new tracing system will support a buffering mechanism which will allow trace events to be collected locally and then dumped in larger, more efficient messages, rather than many smaller ones, thereby reducing intrusion. A more flexible trace event definition scheme will also be instantiated, based more directly on the SDDF (Self-Defining Data Format, Reed et al) trace syntax. This new scheme expedites the collection and analysis of execution histories by custom user tools and XPVM, and allows for integration of custom user trace events and system upgrades. The new tracing instrumentation will still be built into the PVM library to avoid re-compilation, and additionally will supports on-the-fly adjustments to each task's trace event mask, to interactively control the level of tracing detail.
Along with this new tracing facility, XPVM will be updated to provide better access to the new tracing functionality. Several new views will be implemented to utilize the additional tracing information now possible, and user-defined events will be included in existing views. The XPVM system has also been optimized to provide better real-time monitoring capabilities.
A Postscript copy of the presentation slides is available.