Allinea Software, a supplier of high performance computing tools, has announced a seller agreement with IBM involving joint sales and marketing of Allinea's distributed computing products. The agreement will bring IBM customers Allinea's scalar and parallel toolkit, including its Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) and its new Optimization and Profiling Tool (OPT). The tools are available on systems based on IBM Power Architecture technology, AMD Opteron, and Intel-based clusters and SMPs.  They are designed to help customers develop scalable parallel applications that are able to use the growing number of CPUs delivered in modern HPC architectures. The agreement follows a number of joint successes where DDT and OPT have been chosen by IBM customers for their development requirements on IBM AIX and Linux supercomputing platforms.

"Today's computer systems offer significantly more processors than in the past, and with the trend towards multi-core microprocessors and large numbers of execution units on chip, the need for reliable and scalable parallel software is increasing. We believe that our powerful development tools can help IBM and its customers to harness the power that these systems provide," said Michael Rudgyard, CEO of Allinea Software. "We are very happy to be entering into this global sales agreement with IBM."

Allinea announced the availability of DDT for Linux on POWER at Supercomputing 2004, and shortly afterwards it released DDT for AIX. Since then, it has registered a growing numbers of successes on these platforms.

Leicester University was one of Allinea's first customers for Linux on POWER, and has an 108 processor cluster of SMPs that is used for Astrophysics simulations. "When we bought our OpenPower cluster from IBM, we needed an cross-platform parallel debugger that we could offer to our users," said Chris Rudge, Facility Manager for the UK Astrophysics Fluids Facility at Leicester University. "We found Allinea's DDT debugger both powerful and easy-to-use, and have been working closely with Allinea to help define requirements for their new OPT profiler."

"As one of Allinea's earliest customers for DDT, we have had the opportunity to see the tremendous improvements in the product's capabilities over the last two years. DDT is exactly what we are looking for in a parallel debugger: powerful, cross platform, yet easy to use on both workstations and clusters. So when we were planning to buy the Linux on Power cluster from IBM, we choose DDT for this platform: it was an easy choice" Alan Tackett, Technical Director of the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University said.

Institut Francais du Petrole (IFP), the French national Oil and Gas research center, which owns a cluster (AMD, Intel and IBM Power based) running under different flavors of Linux and AIX, required a software environment that supported their heterogeneous environment. "We wanted to get a universal powerful parallel solution and only Allinea could provide us with such a complete offer with the kind of reactivity we are wanting from a successful company" Stephane Requena, HPC Architect at IFP said.

IBM has a continued commitment to accelerating the adoption of cluster computing for large-scale computing applications," said Herb Schultz, Program Director, Deep Computing, IBM. "Working with providers such as Allinea, IBM can help customers to drive higher levels of performance from these solutions - ultimately increasing customers' ability to apply computational power to solve complex problems."