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Performance visualization is used to evaluate performance, verify correctness, diagnose problems, and gain insight into structure and execution behavior. The process of creating and using visualizations is supported by a visualization system and deals with issues such as the creation of effective displays, depiction of concurrent actions, and scalability of displays. This presentation examines the construction and use of performance visualization systems in high-performance computing (HPC). We focus on the usability of visualization tools by users, and on the reusability of visualization software by developers. Each of these design goals has been discussed to a limited extent in the past few years. The cost-benefit tradeoff of these practices in the HPC environment remains an open issue. We review qualities of visualization systems that relate to usability and reusability. We present our object-oriented framework, consisting of low-level and high-level visual objects, for creating displays with reusable components. We describe the software architecture and markup language (VOML) for component-based development of high- level visual objects. Extensions of the architecture support a new paradigm called Uniform Resource Visualization (URV) that addresses the need for: (1) visualization standards; (2) composing system-level views; and (3) sharing visualization design knowledge.
