GAMING

TotalView Technologies, a provider of interactive analysis and debugging tools for serial and parallel codes, today announced that the STFC Daresbury Laboratory in Warrington, U.K. has chosen to use TotalView to improve scientific research efforts and parallel application development on its IBM Blue Gene/P system. Daresbury scientists will use TotalView on the Blue Gene/P in collaborative programs across a range of disciplines, including computational chemistry, materials and fluid dynamics, and ocean and atmospheric modeling. Daresbury Laboratory is part of the U.K.’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, whose facilities are used by more than 5,000 scientists and engineers, and comprise one of the largest multidisciplinary research organizations in Europe. Both U.K. national machines supported through Daresbury, the HPCx supercomputer and Cray’s HECToR, also use TotalView for parallel debugging in development. “TotalView’s collaborative arrangement is a terrific opportunity for Daresbury Laboratory,” said Mike Ashworth, head of advanced research computing at Daresbury’s Computational Science and Engineering Department. “Scalability will be a huge issue for us in the future so we are very interested in how development tools will scale to thousands of processes as our programming needs grow, and we want to explore the best options for meeting the challenge successfully.” TotalView is a comprehensive source code analysis and memory error detection tool that dramatically enhances developer productivity by simplifying the process of troubleshooting parallel, data-intensive, multi-process, multi-threaded or network-distributed applications. Blue Gene/P platform support has been enhanced in recent versions of TotalView to include memory debugging, asynchronous control of threads created by OpenMP and/or Pthreads, support for dynamic libraries, and support for attaching to running executables. TotalView supports the latest BG/P software stack (V1R2M0, up to efix #17). Built to handle the complexities of the world’s most demanding applications, TotalView is capable of scaling from one to thousands of processes or threads with applications distributed over multiple machines or processors. It also provides visibility into thread creation and grouping via a full graphical user interface, giving developers the ability to analyze bugs to identify the root cause of problems and manipulate and control threads as needed. “IBM’s Blue Gene/P is bringing a level of supercomputing power heretofore unavailable to scientists all over the world,” said Mike Hennessy, vice president of HPC marketing at IBM. “The processing capabilities of the Blue Gene/P in combination with TotalView’s scalable debugging technology will help enable advanced research facilities like Daresbury to take the next step in scientific discovery.” “We are pleased that Daresbury has selected TotalView to help drive their research efforts,” said Jim Chafel, vice president of business development at TotalView Technologies. “TotalView will make it significantly easier for Daresbury’s scientists to collaborate and harness the power of IBM Blue Gene/P platform to speed solutions to market.”