UK's STFC Scientific Computing Signs Collaboration Agreement With Rogue Wave Software
The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Rogue Wave Software, the largest independent provider of cross-platform, software development tools and embedded components, have signed a Collaboration Agreement to work together on software tools to increase significantly the productivity of software development for scientific computing. As part of this new agreement, STFC's Scientific Computing Department will collaborate with Rogue Wave to develop next-generation HPC software tools to enhance the software development capabilities of its newest supercomputers.
STFC's Scientific Computing Department and Hartree Centre provide research scientists and industrial clients around the world access to supercomputing facilities to support scientific and technology development. Rogue Wave's TotalView debugger has been deployed on the Hartree Centre's latest IBM Blue Gene/Q® “Blue Joule” which is rated at over 1 Petaflop per second, and IBM iDataPlex® “Blue Wonder” systems, as well as the Emerald cluster with NVIDIA® GPU acceleration at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
One of the key issues in software development is the ability to find bugs in new versions of computer programs which cause the answers to be different from the old code, leading to incorrect science. Using Rogue Wave's debugging toolset, this new collaboration will focus on “comparative debugging,” to automate the process of tracking down these hard-to-find bugs and to increase the productivity of STFC's skilled programmers.
“As a publicly funded organization it is imperative that we maximise the return on the investments in the Hartree Centre's world-class systems. This requires access to the best tools to support our work in developing the next generation of large-scale applications,” stated Dr. Mike Ashworth, Head of Applications Performance Engineering at STFC Daresbury Laboratory. “This new collaboration agreement extends on our existing relationship with Rogue Wave, and will enable us to take full advantage of the compute power provided at our facilities.”
“The fact that leading laboratories, such as STFC, continue to select TotalView to debug applications on the newest and fastest machines demonstrates the power and advantages of Rogue Wave's debugger,” stated Scott Lasica, Vice President of Technical Services at Rogue Wave.