Ellexus Releases I/O Profiling Tool Suites Based for Arm Architecture

Today Ellexus released versions of its flagship I/O profiling products Breeze, Healthcheck and Mistral, all based on the Arm v8-A architecture. The move comes as part of the company’s strategy to provide cross-platform support that gives engineers a uniform tooling experience across different hardware platforms.

As the high-performance computing industry targets new compute architectures and cloud infrastructures, it’s never been more important to optimise the way programs access large data sets,” said Dr Rosemary Francis, CEO of Ellexus, on the decision to release versions based on Arm. “Bad I/O patterns can harm shared storage and will limit application performance, wasting millions in lost engineering time. We are extremely excited to announce the integration of our tools with the Arm tool suite. Together we will be able to help more organizations to get the most out of their compute clusters.”

Accompanying the release, Ellexus is also announcing that its tools will be integrated with Arm Forge and Arm Performance Reports, market-leading tools for debugging, profiling and optimizing high performance applications, previously known as Allinea.

The integration takes advantage of a custom metrics API in the Arm tools, allowing third parties to plug into them and enable contextual analysis of more targeted performance metrics. The integration with Arm tools will provide an even more comprehensive suite of I/O profiling tools at a time when optimization has never been so important.

Unlike other profiling tools, Ellexus’ technology can be run continuously at scale. The reports generated give enough information to make every engineer an I/O expert. These tools will help organizations to deploy an I/O profiling solution as part of software qualification, as a live monitoring tool, or as a way to understand and prevent I/O problems from returning.

Arm is always looking for ways to further optimize our high-performance application estate, and as we continue to scale up and out this has never been more important,” said Tim Whitfield, vice president and general manager, Technology Services Group, Arm. “Arm and Ellexus are continuing a deep collaboration in this space to provide a comprehensive tools suite for HPC.”

Ellexus Mistral is designed to run in real-time on a cluster, identifying rogue jobs before they can cause a problem. In contrast, Ellexus Breeze provides an extremely detailed profile of a job or application, providing dependency analysis that makes cloud migration or migration to a different architecture easy. Ellexus’ latest tool, Healthcheck, produces a simple I/O report that tells the user what their application is doing wrong and why, giving all users the power to optimise I/O for the cluster.

Ellexus Mistral, Breeze and Healthcheck add a comprehensive layer of I/O profiling information to what is already on offer from the Arm tool suite, and can drill down to which files have been accessed. They provide additional monitoring for IT managers and dev ops engineers, in particular those who run continuous integration and testing frameworks.

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