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 operation
.
Great care has been exerted to design the visual user interface as
ergonomic and unobtrusive as possible,
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.
Figure 6.6: GUI for
work-in-progress and status information for runs, system jobs, and hosts.