STFC Daresbury Laboratory Selects TotalView

Warrington, U.K-based STFC Daresbury Laboratory, has said that it selected TotalView to improve scientific research efforts and parallel application development on its IBM (News - Alert) Blue Gene/P system. Daresbury Laboratory is part of the U.K.'s Science and Technology Facilities Council.

 

In collaborative program across a range of disciplines, Daresbury scientists are expected to use TotalView on the Blue Gene/P. These disciplines include computational chemistry, materials and fluid dynamics, and ocean and atmospheric modeling.

 

The U.K. national machines, HPCx supercomputer and Cray's HECToR, are also using TotalView for parallel debugging in development. These machines are supported through Daresbury.

 

A comprehensive source code analysis and memory error detection tool, the TotalView simplifies the process of troubleshooting parallel, data-intensive, multi-process, multi-threaded or network-distributed applications.

 

In the recent version of TotalView, Blue Gene/P platform support has been enhanced to include memory debugging, asynchronous control of threads created by OpenMP and/or Pthreads.

 

In addition, it also features support for dynamic libraries, and support for attaching to running executables. TotalView is capable of scaling from one to thousands of processes or threads with applications distributed over multiple machines or processors.

 

Additionally, it provides visibility into thread creation and grouping through a full graphical user interface. This gives developers the ability to analyze bugs to identify the root cause of problems and manipulate and control threads as needed.

 

“TotalView's collaborative arrangement is a terrific opportunity for Daresbury Laboratory,” said Mike Ashworth, head of advanced research computing at Daresbury's Computational Science and Engineering Department.

 

He also said that Scalability will be a huge issue for his firm in the future, adding that they are very interested in how development tools will scale to thousands of processes as their programming needs grow. “We want to explore the best options for meeting the challenge successfully.”

 

Mike Hennessy, vice president of HPC marketing at IBM, said that the processing capabilities of the Blue Gene/P in combination with TotalView's scalable debugging technology will help enable advanced research facilities like Daresbury to take the next step in scientific discovery.

 

“TotalView will make it significantly easier for Daresbury's scientists to collaborate and harness the power of IBM Blue Gene/P platform to speed solutions to market,” said Jim Chafel, vice president of business development at TotalView Technologies.