Allinea Software announces collaboration with TACC on development tools

Allinea Software, an innovative tools company based in Warwick (UK), today announced that it has signed an agreement with the Texas Austin Computing Centre (TACC) that relates to the definition, development and testing of next-generation debugging capabilities on very large numbers of processes. Allinea’s Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) offers a number of unique features for programmers of large-scale cluster systems that use the latest generation of multi-core processors. Version 2.1 of DDT, released earlier this year, brings improved ease-of-use, advanced threading and OpenMP support, and a more capable array viewer which allows users to manipulate large multidimensional arrays. Version 2.2, to be released imminently, adds new features that deal with increasing scalability requirements. Allinea’s tools are used on the majority of large-scale HPC systems in Europe, and the agreement with TACC will enable Allinea to demonstrate its technology on the Ranger system based on the Sun Constellation System and the latest quad-core AMD processors - one of the most significant US HPC systems. Karl W. Schulz of TACC stated, ‘Developing software that can scale to thousands of compute cores is one of the major challenges in HPC. With the acquisition of our new Ranger system, TACC needed to offer scalable tools to the scientists and engineers that will develop applications for this system. To that end, TACC will deploy DDT as the graphical debugging tool on Ranger for use by a community of diverse users and we are pleased to continue working with Allinea to help define the next generation of tools for systems with 10’s of thousands of processor cores” “We are delighted to announce this key partnership with TACC and Sun Microsystems in North America. It not only strengthens our market presence in the US , but demonstrates the capability of our existing product as well as our commitment to developing new techniques for debugging at massive scale” said Michael Rudgyard, CEO and founder of Allinea Software.. “Sun is pleased to be part of the collaboration to implement a Petascale debugger on Ranger – one of the first Petascale systems to be deployed in the US,” said Bjorn Andersson, Director of HPC, Sun Microsystems. “When working with systems of Ranger's magnitude it is imperative to have innovative tools like DDT that are capable of assisting developers create applications that can take advantage of such large scale systems like the one Sun has installed at TACC.” DDT is compatible with Solaris, Aix, and Linux operating systems, on X86, X86-64, IA64, Power, UltraSparc and Cell processors. It is also compatible with compilers from Sun, Pathscale, Absoft, The Portland Group IBM, Intel and GNU as well as all known MPI distributions. Allinea Software will be exhibiting at the Supercomputing Conference (SC2007) in Nevada, USA from November 10 -16, 2007.