SCIENCE

The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), one of the UK’s most prominent centers of scientific research, are using Allinea Software’s Allinea DDT debugging tool to provide the capability needed for a new generation of science on their powerful Blackthorn and Willow Bull systems.

AWE plays a crucial role in the defense of the United Kingdom, by providing and maintaining the warheads for the country’s nuclear deterrent, Trident. As a center of scientific and technological excellence, they are home to some of the most advanced research, design and production facilities in the world.

Jacques Philouze, Worldwide Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Allinea Software said, “The work AWE does is unique and vital to defending the UK. They have requirements for both capability computing – very large jobs, and capacity computing – many small jobs. Allinea DDT is able to meet all their varying requirements with ease.”

Scientific researchers at AWE carry out many trillions of calculations per second to further the understanding of elemental physics. Their simulations and three-dimensional modeling are of the utmost importance in order to ensure the UK’s nuclear deterrent is safely maintained under the auspices of Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans real-life tests.

The company is committed to investing in its infrastructure and facilities to support the science program. This has led to requiring development tools that cope with the size and diversity of the systems and applications in place now - and in the future.

“As the size of jobs we need to do have grown, so have our debugging needs. It was really important to move to a debugger that is extremely fast and stable at any scale”, said Ken Atkinson, AWE’s High Performance Computing Strategy and Procurement Manager. “Allinea DDT was the obvious choice and we have been extremely happy with the product since it was adopted - its user interface makes debugging effective and straightforward for our application developers, even when we are working with large-scale hybrid CPU/GPU applications.”