New Allinea DDT 4.0 Release Brings Software Development for Remote HPC Systems Closer to Home

Allinea DDT 4.0 will make it easier for scientists to debug and optimize HPC code even when they’re on the road.

The release of Allinea DDT 4.0 includes native remote clients for Linux, Windows and Mac.

These clients allow debugging of HPC applications, wherever they are hosted – on nationwide HPC resources or out in the rapidly growing HPC Cloud.

One site already using this new capability is Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, home of Titan, the large Cray XK7 system. Titan was confirmed as the world’s fastest computer last November when it achieved 17.59 petaflops and has already adopted Allinea DDT 4.0.

“We’ve got a lot of academics, lab people, and industry people who are on the road a lot for conferences and meetings. It’s important for them to be able to work remotely,” says David Bernholdt, a senior computational scientist in R&D at ORNL. “Instead of having to put statements in the code, recompile, reset, and go through this whole long cycle, they’ll be able to pop up their clients on their laptops and figure out what’s going on right away.”

“We’ll be able to give researchers from around the world access to a GPU-based system on a scale that has never been fielded before,” says Bernholdt. He notes that while it’s exciting to be at the top of the world’s list of fastest supercomputers, ORNL’s key focus is supporting the computational needs of researchers so they can produce good science.

The new native client approach is paying dividends for users. “The advantage of a true native client is in the response times,” adds Chris January, VP Engineering at Allinea, “when you’re debugging code on a cluster you don’t want a slow connection to make you step twice or accidentally delete breakpoints. Only a native client can respond quickly enough to keep users in complete control.”

Also released simultaneously with Allinea DDT 4.0 is the new Allinea MAP profiling tool.

“The fact the two tools share a common interface is powerful. Domain scientists will be more likely to use the profiling tool because they don’t have to learn a whole new tool,” says Bernholdt.

That common interface has also seen a significant upgrade with the 4.0 release. “Again and again we hear from people who are using Allinea DDT as a tool not just to debug their code, but to explore and understand it,” explains David Lecomber, COO of Allinea Software, “To improve their experience we’ve upgraded the code viewer significantly with full-colour syntax highlighting for C, C++ and Fortran and helpful features such as loop and function folding to keep even the most complex and sprawling of HPC codes understandable.”

“On the world’s fastest supercomputer, like every HPC system large and small, it’s in everybody’s interest to have software and developers using machine time as efficiently as possible: software tools make this possible” adds Lecomber.