INDUSTRY

In a joint effort with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make more sophisticated open-source performance tools available to government laboratories, universities and other researchers, Silicon Graphics today announced it is developing an open-source version of the SGI SpeedShop performance analysis tool. Aimed at accelerating research efforts on Linux OS-based systems, the NNSA-funded project will provide the evolving open-source community with broad access to SpeedShop that for years has been a staple on IRIX, the world's most technically advanced UNIX high-performance computing environment. "Cost-efficient Linux systems are becoming commonplace in the nation's research facilities, but the ecosystem of open-source tools and utilities hasn't matured as rapidly as the operating system itself, and this leaves researchers at a productivity disadvantage," said Thuc Hoang, Path Forward program manager, NNSA. "With the development of an open-source version of SGI's SpeedShop tool, researchers can begin relying on the same class of open-source parallel performance tools that they have used for years in HPC environments. This will ensure that researchers working on Linux systems - not just at the NNSA but throughout the nation and the world - can accelerate their research efforts by continuously optimizing application and system performance," Hoang added. Creating a Linux version of SpeedShop, named Open/SpeedShop, will make it easier for laboratory scientists and researchers to analyze the performance of applications and tasks while eliminating bottlenecks and bugs, maximizing overall application performance, and improving the quality of data and results. SGI is collaborating with the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland on the project. SGI SpeedShop provides a wide variety of experiments to help users identify and remove performance obstacles, pinpoint system resource usage, and detect memory leaks. Open/SpeedShop for Linux OS-based computing systems running on a wide range of computing platforms will be made available to the open-source community to accelerate independent use and development. It will feature core SpeedShop components such as support for single system image and cluster configurations, exclusive and inclusive user time sampling, program counter sampling, MPI call tracing, input/output tracing, floating point exception tracing, and CPU hardware performance counter experiments. The new version's modular design will also enable users to extend the tool's functionality by adding their own performance experiments to monitor application performance. "SGI is excited to participate in this effort, not only because of our growing commitment to the open-source community, but also because this project can serve as the model for future development of open-source tools designed for parallel computing environments," said Rich Altmaier, vice president of engineering, Storage and Software Group, SGI. "The baseline SpeedShop code will provide Linux users with a foundation for running performance experiments on their systems and applications, while the Pro-series plug-ins from SGI can extend the tool for more sophisticated use." Software development groups within the NNSA's ASC program plan to leverage the open-source version of SpeedShop to develop large-scale experiments of their own. In addition to development of the baseline open-source version of SpeedShop, SGI plans to independently develop Pro-series plug-ins and enhancements that will be made available for commercial license. Both the open-source code and the commercial Pro-series plug-ins will be based on dynamic instrumentation, developed at the Universities of Wisconsin and Maryland, which will reduce the amount of performance data generated, by being more selective about what performance data the tools will gather, and thus allow more efficient measurements and faster conclusions for end users. SGI and the NNSA expect to release the Linux version of SpeedShop in 2006. As additional information becomes available it will be posted at www.oss.sgi.com/openspeedshop. Background: PathForward is a technology vendor partnership project of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program - an integral and vital element of our nation's Stockpile Stewardship Program, by which the U.S. ensures confidence in the safety, performance, and reliability of its nuclear stockpile. ASC provides the integrating simulation and modeling capabilities and technologies needed to combine new and old experimental data, past nuclear test data, and past design and engineering experience into a powerful tool for future design assessment and certification of nuclear weapons and their components. Through Pathforward, ASC strives to make strategic, targeted investments with its vendor partners to accelerate the development of hardware and software technologies needed to ensure that complete, balanced systems for capability and capacity computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) are available in the marketplace for out-year procurements by the program.