The Productivity from Open, INtegrated Tools (POINT) and Virtual Institute - High Productivity Supercomputing (VI-HPS) projects are offering a "LiveDVD" bootable ISO image that provides a "drop in and go" framework for learning and working with state-of-the-art parallel performance tools in a ready-to-run Linux environment.

Users can burn the image to either DVD or USB media (4GB capacity required), which can then be used to boot their x86-based PC or laptop systems for exploring tool capabilities. The LiveDVD, which is based on the latest Fedora Core 11 Linux distribution, runs entirely from memory and changes no files on the user's hard disk, ensuring a safe way to use the tools without modifying your current Windows/Mac/Linux environment.

The LiveDVD includes pre-installed copies of:

• PAPI
• PerfSuite
• TAU Performance System
• Scalasca
• Marmot
• Vampir/VampirTrace
• UniMCI
• TotalView
• UPC and PPW
• OpenMPI
• GNU Compiler Collection (including OpenMP support)
• DyninstAPI

The LiveDVD contains a version of the Linux kernel that has been pre-patched to allow access to the processor hardware performance counters, enabling in-depth examination of the performance characteristics of user applications, with support for message-passing and multi-threading parallel programming models.

To download the LiveDVD, go http://tau.uoregon.edu/point.iso.

The POINT and VI-HPS projects will present a joint tutorial at SC09, using the LiveDVD for hands-on experience. For more information on the tutorial, see: http://scyourway.supercomputing.org/conference/view/tut138.

The POINT/VI-HPS LiveDVD has been used as a hands-on teaching tool in tutorials at several conferences and workshops. A comprehensive set of tutorial slides is also included in PDF format on the LiveDVD for self-paced training.

The POINT Project is supported by the National Science Foundation as part of the Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program. VI-HPS is sponsored by the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers.