Allinea releases DDTLite debugging tool for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

Provides developers total control of parallel and multi-thread applications to quickly and cost-effectively locate and fix coding problems. Allinea Software, a leading provider of innovative products for large-scale scalar and parallel high performance computing applications, today announced the release of DDTLite, a truly parallel debugging plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. “We are delighted to have Allinea’s DDTLite plug-in available for Visual Studio 2008,” says Shahrokh Mortazavi, Architect for Microsoft’s Windows HPC Group. “Allinea has the leading parallel debugger technology for clusters, and its plug-in for Visual Studio 2008 dramatically shortens the time it takes to troubleshoot MPI programs.” DDTLite’s unique parallel stack view enables developers to view the location of every process and thread simultaneously, compare values and variables, and group them based on code logic. Breakpoints for processes and threads can be set quickly and easily individually, by user-selected groups or as a whole. DDTLite also automatically labels processes with their MPI rank rather than their system process ID for faster problem-solving. “Features such as variable lamination, parallel stacks, and group-wise pause/step/continuation enable developers to quickly understand MPI program behavior, locate bugs and fix them,” says Mortazavi. The product had been in beta testing for the past few months with a number of academic, research and business organizations. “Individual control and inspection of processes and threads is absolutely a must-have feature for a parallel debugger,” said Christian Terboven, Project Lead for HPC on Windows at the Center for Computing and Communication at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and a key participant in the beta testing for DDTLite. “We found the DDTLite plug-in from Allinea to greatly improve the MPI debugging experience with Visual Studio 2008.” DDTLite has been added to Microsoft’s recently-released HPC SDK Toolkit. “With the rapid adoption of multi core technology, lots of Microsoft-based platform code need to be parallelized. DDTLite now allows Visual Studio 2008 programmers at all levels to develop and to debug in parallel using threads and/or MPI without changing their tools,” says Jacques Philouze, Allinea’s VP of Sales and Marketing. “The product is available from an entry-level license that allows multi-threaded debugging on a single workstation to a more complete solution to be used on larger cluster at a very cost-effective price.” DDTLite can be purchased online at the Allinea website. Also available on the website is a white paper written by Allinea entitled Parallel Debugging is Easy, which describes DDTLite’s innovative debugging techniques and shows how parallel debugging can be as easy as scalar debugging.