Enterprise Catches the HPC Tools Bug

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logo-allineaRecent announcements, analyst reports, conferences and anecdotal evidence point to a certain upswing for high performance computing in industry. Many industries have reaped the benefit of HPC for considerable time and are now stepping up a gear with their systems – some even on a par with national facilities, in order to maintain or extend their advantage. Whether in upstream exploration, engine design or aerodynamics – if you can scale up or scale out, you can derive advantage. HPC tools can help an enterprise get a competitive edge.

That scale is a significant challenge, and in part is why many technology vendors and larger research institutions work closely with industry – old and new to parallel computing – on their applications. This win-win situation sees larger clusters with newer technology adopted sooner for the vendors and represents high-profile success for the institutions involved and competitive advantage to industry.

The business case for HPC is so strong when you get the applications right. It’s that need to focus on applications that is seeing some pretty compelling success with Allinea Software’s tools in commercial development.

HPC-skilled programmers are too rare to waste: the need to use time effectively is driving the demand for programming environments and HPC tools that can help them to develop high performance scalable software faster.

Enterprise is taking to integrated development tools that are designed for high performance computing – which means picking up Allinea Software’s unified tools. Allinea Software focuses on providing powerful tools for debugging and profiling in a single consistent environment to developers needing to handle complex multi-process applications at any scale – its technology is proven on the largest systems on the planet.

Allinea DDTWith up to 50% of developer time said to be spent fixing bugs, tools can have a significant impact on success. When asked how much faster it was to fix bugs with Allinea DDT – “I’d say it’s 5x faster” came the reply from one geophysicist at the integrated geosciences company, CGG. “The Allinea DDT debugger saves us considerable amounts of time in fixing parallel bugs and resolving any customer issues,” wrote CFD experts, Convergent Science, developers of the CONVERGE package. “I could not imagine how I would have fixed it without Allinea DDT” added another senior developer.

It’s not just avoiding project delays caused by software defects that requires Allinea Software’s tools, well optimized HPC applications are a competitive advantage and a significant cost saver to users. This is seeing the Allinea MAP profiling tool deliver real results.

“The whole suite of Allinea Software tools helps us to achieve our mission and we can rely on them when we need them most,” reports BAE Systems, adding “the speed and throughput of simulations is becoming more important, meaning we need a good profiler that can work with our production and research codes and help us to optimize that performance.”

Allinea MAP clearly shows where inefficiencies are located. “In one instance we were able to get a 25% improvement in time to solution through using Allinea MAP.”, an R&D head at one company reported, on condition of anonymity!

Integrated, scalable tools sound like quite an advantage – so it’s not surprising that not everyone in industry wants to share those results with the competition! If you can develop your application to be faster, more efficient, or more capable than the competition, and do that faster than the competition can, then you benefit more – for software vendors through wider usage of your product, or for in-house code developers as a competitive advantage to your core business.