SCIENCE

It's that time of year when we engage in retrospectives about the best product of 2006 and, perhaps more importantly, the prospects of it contributing to the supercomputing industry in 2007. Etnus' TotalView was singled out by the notoriously finicky Labs of Supercomputing (SC) Online as being the best product of 2006. The product stood out for several reasons -- it improved developers' productivity, demonstrated superior performance, and gave the supercomputing industry an edge last year. Etnus' TotalView has experienced double digit increases in the number of licenses shipped over the past year, due to its rich functionality and the increasing demand for debugging tools that reduce the time to get multi-core applications to market. TotalView improves software development productivity by simplifying the process of debugging data-intensive, multi-process, multi-threaded, or network-distributed applications. Used to debug many of the world's largest supercomputers, the product is proven and scalable, able to handle from one to thousands of processes or threads. A large portion of the supercomputing workload has moved to commodity clusters. With so much computing power readily accessible, companies and industries of all sizes anywhere in the world, and perhaps even individuals, are able to tap this power to solve more problems than ever before. As a result, major scientific developments need no longer be limited to large universities or major research labs. There's only one problem: Where's the software to take advantage of all these processors, cores and threads? The U.S. Government-sponsored survey by the Council on Competitiveness reported, "There is a lack of readiness for Petascale Systems. Three-quarters (74%) of the ISV applications are ‘legacy applications’ that are more than five years old, and seven out of eight (87%) are at least three years old. Fewer than half (46%) of the ISV applications scale even to hundreds of processors today, and 40% of the applications have no immediate plans to scale to this level. Very few codes scale to thousands of processors today or are being aimed at this level of scalability. If current development timeframes continue, the majority of ISV codes will not be able to take full advantage of petascale systems until three to five years after they are introduced." That's where TotalView comes in. This debugging software will contribute to the growth of supercomputing by helping developers more quickly develop programs and applications that rely on clustered, multi-core technologies. This will allow their organizations to:

• Accelerate the pace of research and the time to delivery for products and solutions
• Deliver more capabilities with fewer skilled resources
• Develop new, more sophisticated capabilities to differentiate their products and
• Establish leading position in their industry or research community gaining market share and recognition.