Entries filed under “Tools”

Today Allinea announced a new scalability record on the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA. Now in full production mode, Blue Waters is the world’s fastest supercomputer on a university campus with a theoretical capacity of 11.62 petaflops.

While getting the machine up to speed, the Blue Waters team ran their own demanding acceptance trials with Allinea DDT debugging more than 700,000 MPI processes simultaneously.

Having Allinea DDT in the hands of users at this scale whenever the need arises and at any scale – with its lightning fast performance and easy to use interface – is a critical part of getting the scientific applications to super-petascale,” says David Lecomber, COO and founder of Allinea.The implementation of the Blue Waters system had a tough timeline – and having a debugger ready to deploy at large scales was critical to meeting the schedule. “We knew our tool was more than ready,” says Lecomber. “We wanted the NCSA to take Allinea DDT to the extreme and see it first-hand, as real users. They came back with the news that it was 30x faster than they specified in performing common debugging tasks—without any extra tuning.”

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Over at HPC Admin, Dell’s Jeff Layton writes that the plethora of available processing architectures today makes it more important than ever to know your application.

Two basic approaches are available to help you understand your application: profiling, which gathers summary data when an application is run, and tracing, which presents a history of events as a function of time when the application is executed. I believe both tools can be used to gather information about your application so that you can begin to paint a picture of how your application behaves and how it interacts with the system. In my opinion, just application profiling or tracing is not enough: You also need to profile and trace the system while the application is running so you get a much more complete picture of what the application is doing and what the system is doing to support the application or in response to it.

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Over at ACMQUEUE, Brendan Gregg from Joyent writes that performance-analysis methodology can provide an efficient means of analyzing a system or component and identifying the root cause of problems, without requiring deep expertise. Methodology can also provide ways of identifying and quantifying issues, allowing them to be known and ranked.

Methodologies in common use today sometimes resemble guesswork: trying familiar tools or posing hypotheses without solid evidence. The USE Method was developed to address shortcomings in other commonly used methodologies and is a simple strategy for performing a complete check of system health. It considers all resources so as to avoid overlooking issues, and it uses limited metrics so that it can be followed quickly. This is especially important for distributed environments, including cloud computing, where many systems may need to be checked. This methodology will, however, find only certain types of issues—bottlenecks and errors—and should be considered as one tool in a larger methodology toolbox.

This is a nicely-written and detailed feature that is well worth a look. Read the Full Story or Download the PDF.