NEWS BRIEFS
Framingham, MA – Etnus, a leading supplier of parallel application debuggers for the UNIX market, announced the use of the TotalView Parallel Debugger by the Ohio state-wide network of computers, sponsored by OSC (Ohio Supercomputer Center). The Center’s networking initiative, OARnet, provides Internet access to the majority of Ohio’s colleges and universities and state government agencies. Through OARnet, more than a million Ohioans are connected to the vast infrastructure available through OhioLINK, OPLIN and the World Wide Web.
“TotalView is an important and necessary tool that enables faculty and students in medicine, business, economics, engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and physics to efficiently demonstrate their applications using a supercomputer,” comments Doug Johnson, system developer/engineer with OSC. “It offers advanced support such as OpenMP and MPI and is the only debugger available that works on all of our systems and across OARnet.”
TotalView is the only multiprocess, multithread application debugger that supports Fortran, C and C++ languages along with most parallel programming paradigms including MPI, threads, and OpenMP. GUI-based, it shortens development time via an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use “select-and-dive” approach. It enables developers to unravel and control multiple threads and processes running on single or multiple processor systems. The debugger automatically acquires related processes and threads, and graphically displays data arrays. Users can then easily dive on program objects and structures for more detail.
OSC had been a beta test site for TotalView 4.0 on Linux. After seeing the capabilities of the debugger and having received numerous requests for its use, they purchased TotalView for their state-wide network. The use of TotalView is incorporated into the advanced programming classes taught at OSC. “As more programmers incorporate OpenMP directives and MPI into their work, there’s a need to support them with products like TotalView,” explains Johnson.
“A resource for Ohio’s scientists and engineers, OSC requires a scalable debugger that supports multiple parallel programming models, and can be used on multiple platforms for all types of applications,” comments Mary Kay Bunde, director of market development at Etnus. “OSC evaluated many products for use in their state-wide university program, and chose TotalView as their debugger.”
The multi-process and multi-threaded capabilities of TotalView make it ideal for debugging complex codes used for modeling nuclear physics and oil reservoir simulations, sophisticated econometric applications used for predicting stock market trends, and many high-end applications used in large computing and research laboratories.
OSC is one of the oldest supercomputer centers in America having become fully operational in 1987 with one supercomputer, a Cray X-MP. Today OSC is a fully scalable center with mid-range machines to match those found at the National Science Foundation centers and national labs including six supercomputers. Critical partnerships in computational science, like the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program and the National Computational Science Alliance, allow OSC to help position the state as a national technology leader.
Etnus LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, Inc. is based in Framingham, Massachusetts. The company’s products support application developers and third-party vendors with multiprocessor, multi-node debugging and performance analysis tools. For more information contact Etnus, Inc. at http://www.etnus.com .
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