INDUSTRY

TotalView Technologies, a provider of interactive analysis and debugging tools for serial and parallel codes, has announced that France’s Institute for Development and Resources in Intensive Scientific Computing (IDRIS) is using TotalView to help improve application development and support advanced research on IBM’s POWER6 system and Blue Gene/P. IDRIS’ machines aid scientists in chemistry, astrophysics, and material resistance, among other disciplines. Located Southwest of Paris in Orsay, IDRIS is one of two supercomputing centers part of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), which incorporates six different research departments and two national institutes dedicated to research and scientific advancement over a full spectrum of fields. IDRIS provides high level HPC support and a heterogeneous supercomputing environment for research projects requiring advanced resources, and also acts as a technology transfer agent from R&D to national HPC infrastructures. IDRIS is member of the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), a consortium of leading national supercomputing centers that aims at fostering pan-European computational science research. IDRIS’ IBM Blue Gene/P system, Babel, ranks in the top ten on the most recent international TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. “IDRIS has used TotalView for several years as part of our high-performance computing resources,” said Pascal Voury, user support engineer at IDRIS. “We offer researchers from all over France the capability to improve their applications and advance their projects with the troubleshooting and development capabilities of TotalView, and are pleased to enable scientific research at the HPC level.” TotalView is a comprehensive source code analysis and memory error detection tool that dramatically enhances developer productivity by simplifying the process of debugging parallel, data-intensive, multi-process, multi-threaded or network-distributed applications. Built to handle the complexities of the world’s most demanding applications, TotalView offers a number of advanced features that help speed development and eliminate bugs quickly, and is capable of scaling from one to thousands of processes or threads with applications distributed over multiple machines or processors. The most recent versions support IBM’s AIX 6.1, and have expanded support for the Blue Gene/P platform with asynchronous control of threads created by OpenMP and/or Pthreads, support for dynamic libraries, and support for attaching to running executables. The all-new TotalView 8.6 also includes a new troubleshooting utility called TVScript, which provides TotalView users with a streamlined mechanism for automated and unattended debugging. TVScript significantly condenses the print-style troubleshooting cycle by allowing users to perform multiple runs of a single version of a program – examining different variables at different locations each time – without recompiling or stopping to make source edits. “We are proud to help IDRIS as it seeks to expand research efforts and more ably support the scientific projects within CNRS by utilizing TotalView,” said Jim Chafel, vice president of business development at TotalView Technologies. “TotalView will increase the productivity and efficiency of France’s scientists and developers from all industries as they continue to increase their use of HPC resources.”