VISUALIZATION

NATICK, Mass.--Etnus, provider of the most advanced debugger for Linux and UNIX, today announced the availability of release 6.3 of its TotalView Debugger, featuring expanded support for IBM platforms including: AIX 5.1 and 5.2, debugger-aware parallel checkpoint/restart capabilities and improved compiled expressions performance using IBM's fast-trap mechanism. The release also introduces a new memory tracking feature and selective loading of symbols for shared libraries. Etnus TotalView 6.3 is among the first applications to take advantage of IBM's fast-trap mechanism for compiled expressions. Fast-trap instructions enable process control within the kernel, speeding execution of calls by allowing parallel execution. This allows TotalView to achieve substantial performance improvements by passing process control to the kernel. As a result, Etnus TotalView 6.3 provides vastly improved performance of compiled expressions. TotalView 6.3 also works with IBM's AIX parallel checkpoint/restart mechanism. Users can initiate a checkpoint on a target process during the debugging session and later restart a session that includes the target process from that checkpoint file. The target process can also be saved and restored to the previous state, allowing debugging to be done from that state. Developers can quickly get to and return to suspected trouble points without waiting for sequential execution of the program. "IBM platform support within TotalView 6.3 reflects the strength of our ongoing relationship with IBM. We are taking advantage of IBM technical advances and staying current with IBM operating system releases in order to serve our large customer base of IBM users. The improvements we have made will be well received by customers developing large and highly complex codes that require a premium debugger with superior performance and capabilities," says Rich Collier, Vice President of Engineering for Etnus. TotalView's new memory tracking feature helps developers solve common programming errors related to improperly deallocated memory blocks, errors that can result in poor performance and crashes. Finding the source of these errors can be difficult and time consuming given the complex and dynamic ways in which programs allocate memory. Application startup can be improved in revision 6.3 through selective loading of symbols for shared libraries. This feature allows the user to defer the reading of shared libraries at startup time and get into their debugging session more quickly, a big time saver for developers with large or complex applications. In addition to the improvements made for IBM, new support for parallel models is also included in the release. Both LAM/MPI and the Global Arrays Toolkit are available to Linux x/86 users in the latest version of TotalView. LAM/MPI is a feature-rich, open-source implementation of the Message Passing Interface specification. The Global Arrays (GA) toolkit provides a shared-memory programming interface for distributed-memory computers and complements the message-passing programming model (MPI). About Etnus Etnus is the world's leading provider of debugging and analysis solutions for complex code. Etnus products provide software engineers with the ability to visualize, control and correct complex applications running on a wide variety of platforms and using one to thousands of processors. They offer significant productivity gains in application development, helping to eliminate the frustration, delays, and headaches inherent in analyzing multi-process, multi-thread, and network-distributed applications containing many lines of code or advanced programming techniques such as MPI, threads, and OpenMP. Etnus products are used in the development of applications in industries such as weather prediction, film special effects and animation, oil and gas exploration, CAD/CAM software development, automotive, aerospace, finance and telecommunications. Privately held, Etnus offers its expanding product line through worldwide resellers and direct sales. For more information contact Etnus at: 24 Prime Parkway, Natick, MA 01760; phone: 800-856-3766 (U.S.A.), 1508-652-7700 (outside U.S.A.); fax: 508-652-7701; web: www.etnus.com; e-mail: info@etnus.com.