The On-line Monitoring Interface Specification (OMIS) aims at defining an open interface for connecting on-line software development tools to parallel programs running in a distributed environment. Interactive tools like debuggers and performance analyzers and automatic tools like load balancers are typical representatives of the considered class of tools. Having an agreed on on-line monitoring interface facilitates the development of tools in the way that tool implementation and monitoring system implementation are now decoupled. Bringing n tools to m target platforms will be reduced in complexity from n*m to n+m. In addition, it will eventually be possible to simultaneously use tools of different developers and to compose uniform tool environments. The present document defines the goals of the OMIS project and lists necessary requirements for such a monitoring system. It is an improved and enhanced version of OMIS 1.0 which was published in February 1996. We will describe the system model OMIS is primarily intended for and give an outline of available services of the interface. A special section will give details on how to extend OMIS, as this is an indispensable feature for future tool development.
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