NNSA and TotalView team up to tame development on 20 PFLOPS platform

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This week TotalView Technologies announced that it is teaming up with Lawrence Livermore’s Sequoia effort to advance the company’s flagship debugger to assist with development on Sequoia, the 20 PFLOPS Blue Gene system expected in 2011

TotalView logoAmong the features that TotalView Technologies will incorporate for the Dawn and Sequoia systems are user-programmable data display, fast conditional breakpoints and watchpoints, compiled expressions, asynchronous thread control, and full post-mortem debugging.

At 20 petaflops, Sequoia will be 34 times as powerful as LLNL’s current Blue Gene/L, giving scientists a lot more computing cycles for weapons simulations and basic science research. “Sequoia represents a major challenge to code developers as the multi-core era demands that we effectively absorb more cores and threads per MPI task,” said Mark Seager, Asst. Dept. Head for Advanced Computing Technology at LLNL.  “This programming challenge can only be overcome with world class code development tools.  Through our long-term partnership with cutting-edge technology companies like TotalView Technologies we’re confident we can deliver on our demanding debugger scalability and usability requirements.”

This will be a huge challenge. The information management demands alone are going to be enormous, let alone displaying all that data in a reasonable way.