Supercomputer Scientists Accelerate Code with Allinea MAP

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Today Allinea Software announced that the company has cracked the “performance profiling pain barrier” with the release of Allinea MAP, a powerful performance-analysis tool easy enough for scientists to diagnose problems in their own code.

Allinea MAP runs without the need to instrument or compile with special options. The program annotates the source code with performance information in colored graphs so users can see any problems at a glance. More importantly, Allinea MAP is a lightweight application that adds little overhead even when scaled up to profile tens of thousands of processes.

I think visual tools like Allinea MAP are the only way forward as we approach the daunting complexity of exascale computing,” says Rich Brueckner, president of the popular insideHPC news blog. “Algorithms that scale at hundreds or thousands of nodes tend to behave very differently at ultra-scale, where one has tens of thousands or even millions of nodes to contend with,” says Brueckner. “How one tackles such a problem requires new approaches and ways of thinking. You are never going to make parallel computing easy. What you can do is give the programmer a way to navigate in an ocean of code.”

Allinea MAP can be combined with Allinea DDT, sharing a single interface, so when Allinea MAP shows where performance bottlenecks are forming, you can flip to the Allinea DDT view and step through the code to find the source of the problem.

A lot of code out there is performing badly because the people who write and run it don’t have tools to rapidly and regularly analyze it. We’ve had HPC experts tell us they have to correct the same basic mistakes time after time,” says O’Connor. “A single optimization found with Allinea MAP can save hundreds of thousands of core hours over the lifetime of the code, delivering results faster and letting scientists focus on their real work instead of fighting the tools.”

In this video from SC12, Mark O’Connor from Allinea demonstrates the company’s new MAP performance profiler tool. Read the Full Story.