Prism 6.0 User's Guide

Sorting Messages

You can sort messages by row or by column according to several criteria, by choosing selections from the Sort Rows By and Sort Columns By option menus.

Table 5-1 Column Sort Criteria


Sort Criteria	Description
Order posted	Sort messages by the order in which messages are posted by the MPI program, with the earliest posted on the left. This is the default. The implementation of MPI Sends of large messages may queue and dequeue the message several times once the rendezvous begins, at which point the posted order seen in the visualizer no longer matches the programmatic order. At present there is no way to distinguish such messages.
Source/Destination	Sort by the source rank for receives and the destination rank for sends.
Tag	Sort by the messages' tag values.
Size	Sort by size in bytes, from small to large.
Communicator	Sort by communicator address.
Protocol	Group together messages sent with the same transport protocol. Protocols are loopback, shared memory, RSM, and TCP.

Table 5-2 Row Sort Criteria


Sort Criteria	Description
Rank	Sort rows from the smallest to the largest process rank (the default).
Message Count	Sort by the number of messages posted.
Message Volume	Sort by the sum of the sizes, in bytes, of all messages for each rank.

Since the graphical size of a message is not linearly proportional to the message length in bytes, a number of small messages may occasionally extend further to the right in the visualizer than a single large message of greater total size.