TotalView gives developers Tivo for code [UPDATED]

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Now, this seems cool to me. Yesterday TotalView announced that they’ve added ReplayEngine to their  product stable. ReplayEngine allows developers to record their code during execution and replay it. According to the ReplayEngine product page

TotalView logoReplayEngine’s deterministic replay capability records the execution history of your program and makes that history available for diagnosis with TotalView.  This new approach – working back from a failure, error, or crash to its root cause – eliminates the need to restart your program repeatedly with different breakpoint locations.  The ability to step freely both forwards and backwards through program execution drastically reduces the amount of time invested in troubleshooting your code.

ReplayEngine can be used to debug applications written in C, C++ or Fortran and compiled with many of the compilers supported by TotalView on Linux x86 or Linux x86-64 platforms. ReplayEngine supports debugging distributed applications based on an expanding number of MPI configurations.

You can get it now for Linux on x86 and x86-64 processors. For even more info and analysis, read this piece by Feldman at HPCwire.

[UPDATE] I sent an email to a TotalView rep on how the product would be sold. Here’s what she said

ReplayEngine is a separately priced add-on product for TotalView, yes.  You need TotalView 8.6 (the newest version of the tool which has just become available and will be announced next week) to run ReplayEngine, and it is very tightly integrated with TotalView, but it is a separate add-on product.