Visualizing Parallel Branch and Bound Tree Exploration

Question

I have written a parallel program that does a depth first branch and bound exploration of a tree. I can dump the id's (id's are like this 0, 00, 01, 0000, 0001, etc.) of the nodes at frequent intervals to know the frontier of the tree that is being explored at that instant in the tree. The challenge is to visualize the tree exploration with time. Any ideas? e.g. I can draw trees(e.g. using graphViz) at different times and create a movie out of it.

Looking for ideas to facilitate this visualization - some better ways to do so or easy tools that can help me make the visualization

Answer 1

You also may want to take a look at Ubigraph. It seems like a very pretty way to visualize dynamic graphs (or trees). One downside it that it uses a 3D layout, which is harder to share and understand.

Answer 2

I think vbctool http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/ls_juenger/research/vbctool may be what you are looking for. You can specify time in which in certain event happen (create a node, change its color, etc) and then you can see an animation of what happened with the tree.

Hope it helps (even though you asked this years ago)

Answer 3

Cytoscape with the CyAnimator plugin may do the trick for you. Cytoscape is a graph visualization tool, mainly for biologists, but it does have tree-based layouts. The CyAnimator plugin lets you save states of the visualization and animate the transitions. There is a demo video on YouTube. You may be able to do that with slices of the tree at different times.