The use of computer resources, such as processor time, main memory, and disk, for a set of benchmark database programs.

Question

Describe how you would create visualizations to display information that
describes the following types of systems.
Be sure to address the following issues:

• Representation. How will you map objects, attributes, and relation-
ships to visual elements?

• Arrangement. Are there any special considerations that need to be
taken into account with respect to how visual elements are displayed?

Specific examples might be the choice of viewpoint, the use of trans-
parency, or the separation of certain groups of objects.

• Selection. How will you handle a large number of attributes and data
objects?
The following solutions are intended for illustration.

Answer 1

The resource usage of each program could be displayed as a bar plot
of the three quantities. Since the three quantities would have different
scales, a proper scaling of the resources would be necessary for this
to work well. For example, resource usage could be displayed as a
percentage of the total. Alternatively, we could use three bar plots, one
for type of resource usage. On each of these plots there would be a bar
whose height represents the usage of the corresponding program. This
approach would not require any scaling. Yet another option would be to
display a line plot of each program’s resource usage. For each program,
a line would be constructed by (1) considering processor time, main
memory, and disk as different x locations, (2) letting the percentage
resource usage of a particular program for the three quantities be the
y values associated with the x values, and then (3) drawing a line to
connect these three points. Note that an ordering of the three quantities
needs to be specified, but is arbitrary. For this approach, the resource
usage of all programs could be displayed on the same plot.