INTERCONNECTS
TotalView Debugger helps Edu-Grid win Campus Technology Innovator Award
TotalView Technologies’ TotalView Debugger is Key Element of HPC Program’s Computational Resources: TotalView Technologies, a provider of dynamic analysis and debugging tools for serial and parallel codes, today announced that educational HPC project Edu-Grid, an inter-university joint program led by Northern Iowa University and Earlham College, has been named a 2008 Campus Technology Innovator Award winner by Campus Technology magazine. Edu-Grid uses the TotalView debugger for complex computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and environmental science application development by students and instructors. Edu-Grid is a dedicated educational HPC environment that consists of computational resources, scientific software, documentation, and workshop instruction devoted to supporting the transformation of undergraduate curriculum through high-performance computing. Computational resources include systems donated by Intel, Earlham College, and the University of Northern Iowa, the home institution of project leader Paul Gray. A significant amount of open source and commercial scientific software packages are also available to participants, including the TotalView debugger, which provides faculty and students with the debugging capabilities for all application development under the project. “All technology options had to meet a very high standard with a significant educational benefit to Edu-Grid’s faculty and student consumers,” said Paul Gray, associate professor of computer science at the University of Northern Iowa and Edu-Grid project leader. “We selected TotalView because it is comprehensive, robust and very easy to use. All software had to be simple to deploy and support in order to ensure all educators in the program could reproduce the technologies on their own resources at their home institutions.” TotalView is a comprehensive source code debugger, 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. The new TotalView 8.5 includes enhanced Blue Gene/P platform support, including memory debugging, asynchronous control of threads created by OpenMP and/or Pthreads, support for dynamic libraries, and support for attaching to running executables, as well as support for the Cell Broadband Engine-based Linux systems utilizing the IBM Cell Software Development Kit. 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. The Campus Technology Innovator Awards recognize exemplary colleges and universities, their visionary technology project leadership, and their innovative vendor partners who have deployed extraordinary campus technology solutions to campus challenges. “We are honored to be a valuable part of the award-winning Edu-Grid program,” said Rich Collier, CEO of TotalView Technologies. “That Campus Technology has recognized the growing power of high-performance computing in the classroom and the lab is very encouraging. The potential of HPC and parallel programming for academic research and scientific study at the university level is limitless, and products like TotalView are designed to help speed this transition and adoption.”