HPCwire: Allinea Tools Offer Path to Parallel Programming

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April 18, 2008

Allinea Tools Offer Path to Parallel Programming

by John E. West, for HPCwire

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The shift to multicore architectures in commodity microprocessors brings with it the reality that, as Marc Snir said at a recent press conference (http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2246496.html), "programming" and "parallel programming" must become synonymous. The processors we are seeing now, and will continue to see in at least the medium-term, will offer performance improvements only to those applications that can take advantage of many cores at one time. Since software customers generally expect applications to do more in less time, software developers have a strong incentive to parallelize their codes. But developers generally don't have the skills they need to make this change.

Allinea Software sees this as the perfect opportunity for their particular expertise. The company's flagship product, the Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT), has seen wide adoption, and Allinea has recently introduced its Optimization and Porting Tool (OPT). They are one of those companies that is trying a business model in HPC that is now tried and true: build a technology that appeals to a mass customer base, and tweak it to capture the HPC niche.

When the company started in 2003, the first step in the business plan was to prove they could build a debugger that people would buy. As Allinea assessed the technology landscape at the time, they realized that the primary competition for any company looking to get into the debugger business isn't another company at all. As Jacques Philouze, the vice president for sales and marketing at Allinea, puts it, "Our competition was printf; it's easy to use, everyone is familiar with it, and it's free."

As a UK-based company, Allinea initially targeted a market that Philouze says wasn't well served at the time: academic institutions. "At the time European academic institutions weren't using many tools at all," says Philouze. "Cost was a real issue for them." Their strategy paid off. Allinea demonstrated that they could build a product that people would buy, and according to the company today, DDT is used in the majority of European academic HPC centers on the TOP500 list.

At the low end, the company is still competing with printf, the brute force method used by developers to trace code execution at run-time. Unfortunately printf isn't thread-aware, and as chip vendors increase the core count in their offerings, developers will increasingly need a more sophisticated approach to debugging. Allinea sees its DDT product as particularly attractive to these customers.

"Our customers are choosing us not only because we are cost effective, but also because we have a very easy learning curve," says Philouze. "After one hour of familiarization with DDT, you are ready to debug your code."

The company's mass market dreams got a boost last year when Microsoft and Allinea announced that DDT was making its way into Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment for Windows, as a plug-in called DDT Lite, that will help users debug threaded applications on multicore processors.

Allinea began partnering with vendors in 2005 with a port of DDT to Linux on IBM's Power line. Today DDT is supported on Solaris, AIX, and Linux operating systems and x86, x86_64, Itanium, Power, UltraSparc, and Cell processors. It also supports a variety of compilers and, according to company's Web site, "all known MPI implementations." This covers HPC platforms ranging from Cray's XT line to HP clusters and Blue Gene (on the way). Recent releases have also added specific features for debugging at large scale, and the ability to debug hybrid MPI/OpenMP codes through the Parallel Stack View.

All this platform diversity, along with the company's success in high-end computing -- first in the European HPC market and then in the U.S. with customers like LLNL and TACC -- has given Allinea insight into the problems inherent in debugging very large-scale parallel applications. Many of the straightforward approaches that work with a parallel debugger that is aimed at helping the commodity software developer manage eight cores in a single socket simply don't scale to hundreds or thousands of processors. In fact, according to Philouze, programmers are often overloaded with standard graphical debugging metaphors beyond 64 processors.

How to best manage the information needed to debug an application running on thousands of processors is an open question actively being pursued by companies and research programs alike, and Allinea is part of these efforts. DDT has features that enable programmers to dynamically group processes of interest and focus their investigation on only those processes, as well as information display options and summary views to help manage information complexity at scale. And DDT is designed to provide as much assistance as possible to the user. For example, users are presented with more complex information by default on low core-count debugging sessions, but at higher core counts the application automatically switches to summary views to help users manage complexity.

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