Thomas Kunz. Abstract Behaviour of Distributed Executions with Applications to Visualization . Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany. May 1994.

Abstract

Understanding the behaviour of distributed applications is a very challenging task, due to the complexity of these applications. To manage complexity, the top-down use of suitable abstraction hierarchies is frequently proposed. Given the complexity of distributed applications, manually deriving such abstraction hierarchies is not realistic. The main objective of this thesis is the development of the theoretical foundations and the exploration of the practical implications of automatic abstraction tools for concurrent and distributed systems. We identify numerous approaches towards automatic abstraction. Based on the most promising approaches, we implement two tools that derive two abstraction hierarchies, based on two complementary views of the execution of distributed applications. Ideally, these abstractions should reveal logical units of an application and their relations. To explore the abstraction hierarchies derived, an existing prototype visualization tool was modified to provide abstract visualizations. A user can navigate through these abstraction hierarchies, displaying an execution at various levels of abstraction. Using executions of three different distributed applications, various examples of such abstract visualizations are given and discussed. In general, the abstractions derived automatically represent meaningful parts of the application: they can be interpreted in terms of the application domain. While the abstraction tools do not necessarily derive the best possible abstraction hierarchies in all cases, they do the bulk of the work and provide good initial abstractions which can subsequently be refined manually.
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