Right mouse clicking on 2 of the preview states in the timeline canvas
shown in Figure will pop up 2
Drawable Info Boxes for the preview states. They are displayed as
in Figure
. The popup Info
Box's upper left hand corner will be positioned at exactly where right
mouse click is detected and a green line marker is drawn on the canvas
to indicate what time has been clicked in case the dialog box is moved
from its original popup location. In order to best illustrate what
information is presented by the Drawable Info Box, let's take the
highlighted Drawable Info Box in Figure
as an example. The dialog box which contains a pink label ``Preview
State'' is the Drawable Info Box for preview state, and the icon
inside the dialog box shows the color and shape that are used to draw
the drawable. Below the icon, there is a big text area that prints
all the detailed statistical information about this preview state.
There are 6 timestamps in the text area: maximum duration, average
duration, minimum starttime, average starttime, maximum endtime and
average endtime. Here ``[0]'' refers to starting point, and
``[1]'' refers to the ending point. The 3 ``average''
timestamps are averaged over all the real drawables represented by
this preview drawable. Besides timestamps, the info box also tells
``Number of Real Drawables'' represented by the preview object.
In this case, 136 real states are amalgamated by the pure white preview
state. Also, the text area lists all the different categories of drawables
amalgamated and their ratios of the cumulative duration of all real
drawables amalgamated to the duration the preview states. In this
case, there is only 1 category of real states in this preview state,
so all 136 states are all PACKs. The sum of the durations of all PACKs
is about half of the duration of the preview state as it is indicated
by ``fraction=0.50158036'' which is called category weight.
Another Drawable Info Box is shown at the lower portion of Figure
. Here the preview state
that is pointed by the upper left-hand corner of the Info Box has
3 different strips of colors: yellow, royal blue and white. Right
mouse clicking at the yellow strip pops up a Drawable Info Box with
a yellow state icon with label BARRIER. As shown in the figure, this
preview state amalgmated 4 different categories of real states: ALLREDUCE,
PACK, SSEND, and BARRIER. The statistically most significant one is
BARRIER which proportionally occupies 0.55339056 of the length of
the preview state. Hence BARRIER strip has the tallest height among
all the color strips shown in the preview state. Clicking on the different
color strip in the same preview state will pop up a Drawable Info
Box that has a different icon label of with corresponding color, but
the content of the text area should remain the same. Out of the 4
categories mentioned in the text area, only 3 are graphically displayed
in the figure given the limited pixel height availabel to the preview
state. The least significant category ALLREDUCE is missing visually.
But the limitation can be improved by selecting another display option
for preview state in Preference window that does not rely on the category
weight3.3. As indicated, there are 58 real drawables in the preview state,
but no information is provided about how many real drawables are in
each real categories.