Back in June of this year Allinea announced a partnership with Oak Ridge to work on debugging at the petascale. Today the company is previewing some of the results of that partnership: to date they have been able to use DDT to debug a 220,000 process application running on ORNL’s Jaguar supercomputer.
“Given the inherent complexities of developing applications at Petascale, it is very important that our users are not frustrated by the very tools that are intended to help solve their problems,” said Dr David Lecomber, CTO of Allinea. “Our initial work has therefore focused on making the basic Petascale debugging experience much the same as it would be on very modest numbers of processes. I am pleased to say that we can now launch a debugging session at 220,000 processors in little more time than it takes to spawn the application itself. Current benchmarks also show that we can perform key actions – like stepping 220,000 MPI processes, setting breakpoints, or comparing variables across this number of processors – in a couple of hundred milliseconds or less. This is a massive step beyond what was previously possible in MPI debugging. We are delighted to have been able to achieve this result in such a short period of time.”