Requirements

During the evolution of the Vampir project, we identified a set of abstract requirements with respect to current cluster platforms that typically cannot be fulfilled by most classical sequential post mortem software analysis approaches:

• Do calculations in parallel.
• Support distributed memory.
• Increase scalability for both long (regarding time) and wide (regarding number of processes) program traces.
• Allow preliminary cancellation of requests. After the user spawned an analysis process, it should be possible to terminate the process without waiting for its completion as it might turn out to be very time consuming. With regards to a parallel infrastructure, this requirement is not easy to fulfill.
• Limit the data transferred to the visualization client to a volume that is independent of the amount of traced event data.
• Portability. The analysis component should work on as many parallel platforms as possible.
• Extensibility. Depending on user demands, new analysis capabilities should be easy to add.