Grasp: Visualizing the behavior of hierarchical multiprocessor real-time systems

Trace visualization is a viable approach for gaining insight into the behavior of complex distributed real-time systems. Grasp is a versatile trace visualization toolset. Its flexible plugin infrastructure allows for easy extension with custom visualization and analysis techniques for automatic trace verification. This paper presents its visualization capabilities for hierarchical multiprocessor systems, including partitioned and global multiprocessor scheduling with migrating tasks and jobs, communication between jobs via shared memory and message passing, and hierarchical scheduling in combination with multiprocessor scheduling. For tracing distributed systems with asynchronous local clocks Grasp also supports the synchronization of traces from different processors during the visualization and analysis.