Scrolling partially ordered event displays

Understanding the partial-order relationship between events is critical to understand the behaviour of a distributed or parallel application. Many problems need to be solved in order to provide an accurate and useful display of a large partial order, such as will occur during the execution of any non-trivial application. A display will most likely resemble a process-time diagram, but the “time” axis does not have a fixed interpretation. Flexibility in positioning events along this axis allows more-useful displays to be created, but also greatly complicates scrolling through the event history. This paper first discusses the properties that are arguably desirable for such scrolling and then presents an algorithm that provides scrolling with those properties.