Distributed algorithms visualisation for educational purposes

Abstract

We present our work on building interactive continuous visualisations of distributed algorithms for educational purposes. The animations are comprised by a set of visualisation windows. The visualisation windows are designed so that they demonstrate i) the different behaviours of the algorithms while running in different systems, ii) the different behaviours that the algorithms exhibit under different timing and workload of the system iii) the time and space complexities of the algorithms and iv) the "key ideas" of the functionality of the algorithms. Visualisations have been written for a set of lO algorithms that are tought in a Distributed Algorithms advanced undergraduate course.