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Recording and analyzing the dynamics of application program, system software, and hardware interactions are the keys to understanding and tuning the performance of massively parallel systems. Because massively parallel systems contain hundreds or thousands of processors, each potentially with many dynamic performance metrics, the performance data occupy a sparsely populated, high-dimensional space. These dynamic performance metrics for each processor dene a group of evolving, n-dimensional points. Understanding the dynamic \shape" of these metric paths is only possible if one can examine multiple projections. We have implemented an immersive virtual world, called Avatar, that shows all the possible three-dimensional projections of a sparsely populated, n-dimensional metric space. The presentation metaphor is a three-dimensional generalization of a two-dimensional scatterplot matrix. Users can walk inside a single scatterplot cube, y about the cube of scatterplot cubes, control selected characteristics of the scatterplot display, listen to the sounds of statistical data attributes, and interactively modify application behavior and performance in real time.

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