Champaign, Ill., May 14 -- The Blue Waters project is now well underway with a completion date of Fall 2012. As one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, its immense computational power and stability will allow scientists to make breakthroughs in a diverse range of fields. Allinea DDT is the debugger they call on to help them fix their bugs at full scale and exploit the maximum computational power.

The Blue Waters machine aims to deliver breakthroughs in nearly all areas of science and engineering – to enable discoveries into real-world science and engineering, from astrophysics to DNA, from earthquakes to epidemics. The technologies used on Blue Waters will be the bridge to those that future supercomputers will be built on. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the University of Illinois and the state of Illinois. Cray is installing the main computational and on-line storage systems at the National Petascale Computing Facility (NPCF) in Champaign.

The machine boasts some impressive statistics, including over 380,000 AMD core modules and over 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs housed in Cray XK6 and XE cabinets. The result of all this power will be a peak performance of around 11.9 petaflops.

The greatest objective behind this CPU-GPU hybrid computing system is to provide the most balanced and effective system of its generation. As one of the largest GPU clusters in the world, it will effortlessly provide sustained petaflop performance for the most compute-intensive, memory-intensive and data-intensive applications.

Allinea Software’s tools will enable scientists to exploit Blue Waters’ full potential by resolving software bugs at the full scale of the machine – both for CPU and hybrid CPU-GPU codes. Previous partnerships with large users such as ORNL and other NSF projects such as the Keeneland GPU system have demonstrated their skills in this environment. 

Bill Kramer, Deputy Project Director of Blue Waters, said “We are excited to include Allinea Software as the key debugging on the Blue Waters project. Their experience and tools will make a big impact in the speed at which scientists can complete their research.  We are looking to Allinea to help science and engineering teams become more productive by more quickly moving codes to the new technologies, and also helping team members improve the performance of their codes at the full scale of the entire system. ”   

The Cray Blue Waters system will employ:

• Cray's scalable Gemini high-performance interconnect, providing a major improvement in message throughput and latency.
• AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron™ 6200 Series Interlagos processors, selected by the editors of HPCwire as one of the top five new technologies to watch in 2011.
• Cray XK6 blades with NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs, based on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) next-generation 'Kepler' architecture, which is expected to more than double the performance of the Fermi GPU on double-precision arithmetic.
• 1.5 petabytes of total memory (or four gigabytes per AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor core).
• Cray's scalable Linux Environment (CLE) and HPC-focused GPU/CPU Programming Environment (CPE).
• Allinea DDT 3.1.

As applications push at the boundaries, Allinea DDT’s ease of use and lightning performance at extreme scale will be essential to solve software problems as quickly as possible. Allinea Software’s CTO, David Lecomber, said “Allinea DDT is the only debugger capable of debugging at this scale. We are extremely proud to be part of this project and have found the team’s commitment and passion to create a resource that will help solve extremely challenging and global problems to be in line with our own.”

About Allinea Software

Allinea Software is the leading supplier of tools for parallel programming and high performance computing (HPC). Allinea’s products are used by leading commercial and research institutions across the world, and have consistently set the standard for affordability, functionality and ease-of-use – whether applied to applications at modest scale or peta-scale applications on the world’s largest supercomputers. With new product features aimed at multi-threaded applications and mixed computing architectures, Allinea is now bringing its wealth of experience in parallel tools to the rapidly-expanding arena of multi-core processing.

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Source: Allinea Software