Stanford High Performance Networking Group

SimGraph

A graphing tool for real-time visualization of simulation data

Introduction

This project started as a tool for real-time visualization of data coming from the Tiny-Tera simulator, a system-level, event-driven simulation of the tiny-tera switch. Later it was generalized so as to make it easy to integrate with other simulators, so that the researchers working on simulations can benefit from it.

The objectives of the project were twofold:

Help the developers debug their code by being able to see what is going in the simulator, and to look for anormalities in the behaviour of the simulator.
Help the researchers to observe the progress of the simulation in real-time.

The graphing tool can be attached to the simulator at any time. It starts by extracting from the simulator the information about what variables can be displayed, making it fairly independent from the simulator itself. Then the user choses to display one of them. Two views are currently available: a bar-graph and a time-series graph. In the bar-graph mode some statistics can be displayed with the variable, if they are available. The user can also add more variables to the current graph, so that they can be directly compared to other variables. He/she can also create new graphs. These variables can be removed later. There is limited suppor for zooming and scrolling the graphs.

Screen shots

Here are some screenshots:

selection of the variable

bar graph

time-series graph

People

People that have worked in this project:

User's Manual

This is too long to be placed here, so please, follow this link.

Developer's Guide

This is again too long. You can find it here.

The applet

You will need JDK 1.1.5 or greater and the Swing classes or JDK 1.2 to run the following application. For more information on how to install these please go to the web site of your web browser vendor or to Javasoft's home page.

IMPORTANT: In order to see this applet running you need to launch first the simulation on the same machine from which you downloaded this page from. Launching the different applet windows may take long (sometimes as long as 1 min, I know, Java is not the fastest language I've ever seen). Please be patient.

For those with an account on klamath.stanford.edu, you can get the latest copy doing a "cvs checkout ttgraph", then make it, a run it as "ttsim config.ds8".

If you have done all this, you can run the applet by going to this page.

If you still want to play around with the graphing tool, but without interacting with the simulator, you can go here.

Source Code

The source.

Page maintained by Pablo Molinero Fernández (molinero@stanford.edu)

Last modified: Fri May 9 11:30:09 PDT 2003