ACADEMIA

Powerful Memory Debugging Capabilities Reduce Production Development Time: Etnus LLC, the world's leading provider of debugging solutions for high-performance computing environments, announced today that it has added support for TotalView's powerful memory debugging capabilities to the Cray XT4 supercomputer product line. TotalView is the primary memory debugging solution for this architecture. TotalView is the world's most advanced debugger on Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X. It enhances developer productivity by simplifying the process of debugging data-intensive, multi-process, multi-threaded or network-distributed applications. TotalView’s interactive memory debugger helps find and eliminate memory problems as code is debugged. Since memory debugging capabilities are built-in, it is less intrusive than other memory analysis tools and eliminates the need to switch tools and re-compile. “TotalView has been a valuable tool used by many Cray customers to debug their applications rapidly and effectively,” said Steve Scott, Cray’s chief technology officer. “We believe that integrating TotalView’s memory debugging capabilities into our Cray XT4 system will further improve our customers’ productivity.” The Cray XT4 system offers a new level of scalable computing for single, powerful computing systems handling the most complex problems. The system is purpose-built to meet the specialized needs of capability class high-performance computing applications, to operate efficiently and reliably at large scale. “State-of-the-art debugging technology is critical for users of systems like the Cray XT4 supercomputer, because this platform is used for data-intensive applications such as high-end modeling and simulations,” said Rich Collier, CEO of Etnus. “With the addition of TotalView’s memory debugging capabilities, developers will be able to reduce their production times by finding even the most difficult memory allocation errors and leaks quickly.” TotalView's sophisticated product features, including parallel process acquisition and control; advanced breakpoints and watchpoints; flexible display capabilities; and ability to test fixes on the fly, enable programmers and developers to shorten the development cycle for getting multi-core applications to market. The memory debugging support built-in to TotalView allows users to watch for memory leaks, monitor the amount of memory a program uses, and track how it allocates and frees memory so that developers are able to stop execution, check for problems, test fixes, and then continue debugging. TotalView was singled out by the notoriously finicky Labs of Supercomputing Online as being the best product of 2006. The product stood out for several reasons -- it improved developers' productivity, demonstrated superior performance, and gave the supercomputing industry an edge last year.