SCIENCE & ENGINEERING NEWS

Washington, D.C. — Etnus, a leading supplier of parallel application debuggers for the high performance computing community, announced that the TotalView debugger/analyzer was selected for use in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administrations (NNSA) 30 TeraOPs supercomputer to be built by Compaq Computer Corporation.

The supercomputer – “Q” – is the latest advancement in the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) within NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program, which uses an integrated program of surveillance, experiments, non-nuclear tests, archived data, modeling and simulation to assess and certify the safety, security and reliability of nuclear weapons without underground nuclear testing.

“Because of the advanced parallel processing capabilities of TotalView, Etnus has become a critical technology partner that Compaq has repeatedly turned to when it comes to developing complex parallel applications,” explains Bill Blake, vice president, High Performance Technical Computing with Compaq. “Initially, ‘Q’ will consist of approximately 12,000 Alpha processors with the option of upgrading to a 100 TeraOPS configuration. TotalView is consistently used on ASCI machines because it can handle the rigors of developing applications that scale to the TeraOP level of performance – efficiently analyzing thousands of processes and quickly providing insight into complex codes.”

Since 1997, TotalView has been used by ASCI in their multi-thousand processor systems. It’s since become the predominant debugger/analyzer for the high performance computing industry. “The partnership with ASCI enables Etnus to develop functionality that pushes the boundaries of development tools today,” comments Rich Collier, vice president, engineering for Etnus. “The functionality we develop today in TotalView for ASCI becomes the functionality needed tomorrow in the commercial marketplace.”

Able to scale beyond the capabilities of any other debugger and run on all major platforms, Total View is used to debug applications that range from modeling nuclear interactions to simulating oil reservoirs, executing sophisticated econometric analysis, and creating leading edge internet applications.

“Terascale compute platforms are in themselves not sufficient to meet the needs of the DOE ASCI program. Complex application codes must be developed, debugged, tuned, and executed with high performance at a scale never before attempted,” explains Jeff Brown, Problem Solving Environment Project Leader with the DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory. “The TotalView debugger has become an indispensable code development tool for developing complex code needing for ASCI projects.”

TotalView is the only multiprocess, multithread application debugger/analyzer that supports Fortran, C and C++ languages along with the major 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.

Located in Boston, Mass., Etnus is a leading provider of debugging and analysis solutions for complex code that provides customers with the ability to visualize, control and correct applications running on a wide variety of platforms – using one to thousands of processors. Visit http://www.etnus.com for additional information on Etnus and TotalView.

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