INTERCONNECTS

 
TotalView Technologies has announced today that the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has selected the TotalView debugger to support advanced scalable code development efforts on their Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Sequoia effort.

The Sequoia effort includes two generations of IBM Blue Gene supercomputers that will deliver the next generation of advanced systems to weapon simulation codes being developed under the ASC program. ASC is a cornerstone of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) program to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without underground testing – Stockpile Stewardship. These two Blue Gene systems are “Dawn,” a 500-teraflop system that was accepted by LLNL in March of 2009, and “Sequoia,” a 20-petaflops system based on future Blue Gene technology, slated for delivery in 2011.  “As a long time IBM Business Partner, TotalView Technologies has extensive experience with their software on IBM Blue Gene systems,” said David Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing.  “This combined technology will prove to be beneficial to Lawrence Livermore National Lab as we prepare to deliver the record-breaking 20-petaflop(s) IBM Sequoia supercomputer."

“TotalView Technologies will be continuing an ongoing relationship with LLNL with this opportunity to collaborate on advanced debugging features, particularly in the areas of productivity and scalability,” said Rich Collier, President and CEO at TotalView Technologies.  “We are working to provide the ASC Tri-Laboratory code developers debugging tools on both Dawn and Sequoia with unsurpassed ease-of-use, reliability, and productivity at high scale.”

Among the features that TotalView Technologies will incorporate for the Dawn and Sequoia systems are user-programmable data display, fast conditional breakpoints and watchpoints, compiled expressions, asynchronous thread control, and full post-mortem debugging.

At 20 petaflops, Sequoia will be 34 times as powerful as LLNL’s current Blue Gene/L, giving scientists a lot more computing cycles for weapons simulations and basic science research. “Sequoia represents a major challenge to code developers as the multi-core era demands that we effectively absorb more cores and threads per MPI task,” said Mark Seager, Asst. Dept. Head for Advanced Computing Technology at LLNL.  “This programming challenge can only be overcome with world class code development tools,.  Through our long-term partnership with cutting-edge technology companies like TotalView Technologies we’re confident we can deliver on our demanding debugger scalability and usability requirements.”

Lawrence Livermore is a NNSA national security laboratory. NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
 
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 to thousands of processes or threads with applications distributed over multiple machines or processors.