BIG DATA

Collaboration begins with development of next generation tools for tomorrow’s
petaflop-plus high performance computing systems.

Allinea Software, a leading provider of development tools for large-scale parallel high performance computing applications, announced a new multi-year contract with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop petascale debugging software, capable of handling 225,000 simultaneous processes and above, for next generation supercomputers.

The collaboration will begin by scaling up the capabilities of Allinea DDT (the Distributed Debugging Tool) on the Cray XT5 supercomputer, nicknamed “Jaguar,” which was installed in 2008 at the ORNL facility in Tennessee. Scientists at ORNL have already used the Cray system to set a new world record for a sustained performance of more than one petaflop (a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) on two scientific applications.

The decision to select Allinea for the petascale debugging project was the result of an extended evaluation process. “Our users liked the look and feel of Allinea’s DDT debugging tool,” said Richard L. Graham, Applications Performance Tools Group Leader, ORNL. “We also knew that DDT was being used at several HPC computing centers, such as Lawrence Livermore Labs, NERSC, TACC, and several European supercomputing centers.”

“The incredible speed and processing capacity of the Cray XT5 system enables the scientists and researchers at Oak Ridge to make discoveries and address critical challenges in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, and materials science that could not be solved otherwise,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of scalable systems. “We’re pleased that Allinea has been selected by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop a next generation debugging tool to support our system.”

Dr. David Lecomber, CTO and head of the Allinea development team, welcomes the challenge. “This multi-year agreement with ORNL is a huge opportunity for us and confirms that DDT has the capability to perform at every scale, including at the petaflop level. Our project with ORNL, as well as our recent collaborations with other U.S. labs such as TACC and Lawrence Livermore, and our recent agreement with CEA in France, establishes DDT as the technology of choice with major tier one HPC users. It clearly demonstrates the confidence developers have in our products in terms of providing the accessibility, stability, and scalability needed for tomorrow’s high performance, petaflop supercomputers.”

“Today’s supercomputers, like the Cray XT5, have become incredibly large, “continues Lecomber. “Parallel jobs now have orders of magnitude higher process counts than ever before. Therefore, a new breed of debugging and optimization tools is needed. Our work with ORNL will empower scientists and researchers to take full advantage of the incredible speed and computational capacity of systems like the Cray XT5, and free them to concentrate on conducting scientific research rather than on the mechanics of petascale computing.”

“We’re very pleased to be working with HPC leaders like ORNL and Cray. This next generation of debugging tools we are developing will not only benefit our customers in the U.S., but all the customers Allinea serves on a global basis.”

Allinea Software will be an exhibitor at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2009) in Hamburg, Germany from June 23-26, 2009.