CSC - IT Center for Science Selects Rogue Wave's TotalView Debugger for New Cray XC30 Supercomputer
TotalView Allows Researchers to Quickly Spot and Fix Bugs on High-impact Scientific Research Applications
Rogue Wave Software, the largest independent provider of cross-platform software development tools and embedded components for the next generation of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, announced that TotalView has been selected by CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd to debug scientific and research applications on its new Cray XC30 supercomputer.
Offering IT support for academia, research institutes, and companies, CSC provides Finland's widest selection of scientific software and databases, as well as the country's most powerful supercomputing environment, which is also available to researchers via the Funet network. CSC researchers and post-doctorate scientists will use TotalView to help develop and debug applications ranging from quantum physics and astrophysics, nano-sciences, and chemistry to large-scale meteorological and climatological applications. Many of these applications, which require reliable and flawless execution over many hours when run in parallel on hundreds of MPI-tasks, are part of CSC's Grand Challenge programs. Aimed at high-impact scientific research, these programs require computational or data resources exceeding CSC's standard project quotas or level of services. The TotalView debugger will be deployed on CSC's HP-clusters and the Cray XC30 supercomputer, which is the first Cray supercomputer to use Intel CPUs.
“The CSC continues to leverage Rogue Wave's tools because they are invaluable to our scientists and researchers. Our users are very impressed with TotalView's easy-to-use and intuitive features and they are excited about the new reverse debugging capabilities available on the Cray, which will significantly decrease debugging time,” stated Sami Saarinen, Senior HPC Applications Specialist at CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. “While we thoroughly investigated alternative debuggers, we found the competition to be far behind TotalView's features.”
CSC IT Center for Science Ltd. chose Rogue Wave's TotalView for the Cray XC30 supercomputer, "Sisu," due to its rich debugging capabilities and because TotalView enabled CSC users on the Cray XT machine, "Louhi," to spot and quickly fix difficult programming errors. Specifically, CSC found TotalView's reverse debugging and advanced memory debugging features to be particularly compelling. TotalView's reverse debugging will help CSC users locate hard-to-find bugs much more quickly by offering the functionality of moving forwards and backwards through source code from the point of failure.
“Cray and Rogue Wave's continuous and close collaboration is aimed at improving developers' productivity, so their applications can fully benefit from the extreme power of Cray supercomputers,” stated Peg Williams, Cray's Senior Vice President of High Performance Computing Systems. “Last year Rogue Wave released TotalView with reverse debugging capabilities for our newest Cray systems and our customers have found that the feature significantly decreases debugging time for nondeterministic and hard to find bugs.”
“Rogue Wave works with many scientists performing cutting-edge research and solving Grand Challenge class problems at labs and supercomputer facilities around the world. Time and again, scientists tell us that TotalView provides them with the advanced functionality that makes it possible to quickly fix even complex bugs,” stated Chris Gottbrath, Principal Product Manager at Rogue Wave Software. “The benefit these users experience exceeds simply freeing up time for scientific goals. TotalView gives these scientists the confidence to take the risk of adapting software to leverage new technologies, such as multi-threading. TotalView enables scientists and developers to achieve scientific developments they wouldn't even be willing to try without it.”
TotalView is a scalable and intuitive debugger for parallel applications written in C, C++, and Fortran. Designed to improve developer productivity, TotalView simplifies and shortens the process of developing, debugging, and optimizing complex applications. TotalView provides a powerful combination of capabilities for pinpointing and fixing hard-to-find bugs, such as race conditions, memory leaks, and memory overruns. Providing developers the ability to step freely, both forwards and backwards, through program execution, TotalView's unique reverse debugging capabilities drastically reduce the amount of time invested in troubleshooting code. To help developers maximize hardware capabilities, TotalView also provides debugging support for NVIDIA CUDA™, OpenACC, and the Intel Xeon Phi™ coprocessor.
This year at Cray User's Group, Chris Gottbrath, Principal Product Manager at Rogue Wave Software, will be giving a presentation titled, “Debugging and Optimizing Programs Accelerated with Intel® Xeon® Phi™ Coprocessors” on Tuesday, May 7th, 3:00-5:00 PM, in the Atlas Peak / Castle Peak / Diamond Mountain (Vintners Ballroom). In addition, Mr. Gottbrath will lead a tutorial titled, "Debugging Heterogeneous HPC Applications with TotalView" on Monday, May 6th, 1:00 – 4:30 PM, in the Atlas Peak / Castle Peak / Diamond Mountain (Vintners Ballroom). As a CUG Silver Sponsor, Rogue Wave Software is sponsoring two conference breaks in the Stags Leap / Howell Mountain / Mount Veeder room on: Monday, May 6th at 10:00 AM and Tuesday, May 7th at 2:30 PM.