HPCwire: Totalview Previews New Suite of Multicore Debugging Tools

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November 02, 2007

Totalview Previews New Suite of Multicore Debugging Tools

NATICK, Mass., Oct. 30 -- TotalView Technologies, the world's leading provider of scalable debugging and analysis software solutions for the multicore era, today announced an early experience program for the new TotalView Workbench, Performance Analysis Tools and TotalView TracePoints products. TotalView Technologies products enable software developers to quickly, easily and effectively debug UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X applications running on development machines with single, dual-core, multicore, or multiple processors. Registration for the program is available now on the TotalView Technologies Web site at www.totalviewtech.com/earlyaccess.htm.

The new TotalView Workbench provides users with the ability to access multiple products and company services in a single dashboard, rather than having to open and keep multiple applications running on a desktop. The Workbench includes the following features:

A complete dashboard with access to all installed debugging tools.
A shared mechanism for storing information about recent debugging sessions, so that developers can easily use the right tools for different bugs as they occur.
Access to other debugging resources such as bulletin boards, tech support web sites, etc.
Customization capabilities, allowing the dashboard to be tailored by individual users for their own needs.

The Workbench can be used to launch installed products, resume previous debugging sessions, receive information about new products and/or new capabilities, receive updated information from TotalView Technologies, access company support resources, and more.

The TAU Performance System will be integrated into the TotalView Workbench as the first offering in the TotalView Technologies Performance Analysis Tools suite. TAU (Tuning and Analysis Utilities) is a suite of tools for analyzing the performance of C, C++, FORTRAN and Java programs. It collects parallel profiles and traces containing significantly more information than is available through prof or gprof, the standard Unix utilities.

"We are honored that TotalView Technologies has selected to use the TAU Performance System for their new Performance Analysis Tools suite," said Dr. Allen Malony, director and CEO of ParaTools, Inc. "We have found in our own development work that TotalView Technologies products greatly simplify multicore application development."

TotalView TracePoints removes many of the challenges inherent in print statement style debugging (sometimes called "printf," "cout" or "print*" debugging after the standard text output statements in C, C++ and FORTRAN). Print style debugging is widely used by developers despite the fact that it is very labor intensive – often involving multiple cycles of manual recoding of the program, recompiling and relinking, and manual analysis of text output files.

TracePoints provides users with a better way to identify and diagnose problems with applications during development, testing, and in production. The user starts a program under the control of the TracePoints application and is immediately able to instrument the application "on the fly" with tracepoints. These tracepoints can capture information about the state of the program (variable data, counts and other data) each time they are triggered.

This data can be immediately displayed and efficiently stored. TracePoints gives the user graphical and interactive ways to explore and analyze the data, in order to look for patterns that tell them what is causing the problem. If what led the program to crash can not be discovered from the existing data set, developers can refine their tracepoint set (adding, deleting, disabling, moving and enhancing tracepoints) and re-run the target program with a single click to get a more refined view.

TracePoints will provide the following major features:

The ability to set multiple tracepoints on "sets" of locations such as "entry of every function in this file."
The ability to create dynamic tracepoints (without requiring a recompile).
Tracepoint data is stored efficiently in files that can be displayed as they are created or saved for later analysis.
Table-based analysis tool for viewing the sequence of events and the data collected.
Filters for table-based analysis tool.
Time-line based analysis tool for viewing the sequencing of events between threads and processes.
Source code view within TracePoints GUI.
Data view from within TracePoints GUI.

"All of TotalView Technologies' products are designed to addresses the needs of our customers to further improve overall productivity and shorten the time that it takes them to debug their programs," said Dick Andersen, vice president of marketing at TotalView Technologies. "Many have specifically asked for these capabilities. What makes our products unique among debugging tools is that they follow the workflow that users already are familiar with, saving them from the process of having to adapt to a new interactive debugger troubleshooting process."

Stop by TotalView Technologies booth at SC07, #124, to see a sneak preview of these exciting new products.

About TotalView Technologies

TotalView Technologies is the world's leading provider of scalable debugging and analysis software solutions for the multicore era. TotalView Technologies products enable software developers to quickly, easily and effectively debug UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X applications running on development machines with single, dual-core, multicore, or multiple processors. For more than 20 years, TotalView Technologies products have been at work in research institutions, government laboratories, and technical computing centers, as well as commercial enterprises in the financial services, telecommunications, biotech, aerospace, weather prediction, film special effects and animation, oil and gas exploration, and computer-aided engineering markets. Recognized worldwide as the gold standard for debugging in high-performance, distributed or cluster computing environments, TotalView Technologies' award-winning technology is used to solve the world's toughest computing problems on many of the world's largest supercomputers. For more information, visit www.totalviewtech.com.

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Source: TotalView Technologies

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