ENGINEERING

Allinea Software announced the release of its high-performance scalable parallel debugger, Allinea DDT, for IBM BlueGene/Q systems.

 

The IBM BlueGene/Q (BG/Q) is the next generation in the IBM BlueGene family, and brings unprecedented core counts and multi-petaflop performance.

 

Software developers face their own engineering challenges in fully exploiting the potential of these high-end systems. Leadership sites for HPC application development recognize the importance of development tools at scale: application failure is incredibly expensive in machine time and in missed – or invalid - scientific results.

 

One such site, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), hosts Mira, an IBM BG/Q capable of carrying out 10 quadrillion calculations per second on over 750,000 cores. Allinea have worked closely with ANL over the last two years to adapt Allinea DDT’s scalable architecture to the older IBM BlueGene/P and to prepare for the IBM BlueGene/Q architecture. This work has seen Allinea DDT set debugging scale and performance records for this system family.

 

Allinea DDT’s easy to use interface allows its users find bugs easily and to quickly return to their scientific work. The scalability and speed of such software is extremely important – Allinea DDT has been proven to perform on both counts with 100,000 cores being debugged as quickly as just 1,000.

 

David Lecomber, CTO of Allinea Software, said “Allinea DDT is the only debugger capable of debugging at this scale. We are extremely proud to be part of this project and to be assisting such important scientific work.”

 

“This tool has already proven its value in the migration of our early science applications onto Mira,” said Kalyan Kumaran, who manages ALCF’s applications performance engineering team. “These projects cover the range of scientific fields, numerical methods, programming models and computational approaches expected to run on Mira, so accurate debugging is critical.”