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6.6 Graphical User Interface

For interactive operation, a graphical user interface has been designed and implemented that intends to present all important information on work-in-progress, data base contents, system status, etc., in an intuitive and convenient way and to support all available functionality without imposing restrictions or enforcing ``unnatural'' procedures of operationgif.

Great care has been exerted to design the visual user interface as ergonomic and unobtrusive as possiblegif, refraining especially from using a multitude of pop-up windows, but using a rather rigid screen layout with fixed locations for most widget items. Nevertheless, the screen layout is customizable to fit all applications' needs. Adding functionality to the visual user interface and changing its look-and-feel are simplified by a set of functions that provide simplified access to the framework's widget library. User interface reactions may be modified at run time without need for interrupting a session.

Figure 6.6 shows the visual user interface during parallel execution of a split-lot experiment on a UNIX workstation cluster. The upper part of the screen displays the experiment split tree generated for all known experiments for the selected process flow. The middle part of the screen shows a monitor window listing all queued and active system jobs for external simulators and auxiliary tools. The lower part indicates the states of all available machines that are being used by the simulation environment.

In the upper part, runs appear from left to right, the step sequence flows from top to bottom. The topmost entry of each column, carrying a number, represents the entire experiment, the leftmost column shows the step names as defined in the flow description. The remaining matrix has an entry for each step of each experiment. Split branches are shown to the right of the split parent. To find the parent run of a split run, move left until you run into a step entry.

 figure1721
Figure 6.6:   GUI for work-in-progress and status information for runs, system jobs, and hosts.




next up previous index
Next: 6.6.1 Color Coding Up: 6 Run Control Previous: 6.5.4 Rework

Christoph Pichler
Thu Mar 13 14:30:47 MET 1997