The Blue Waters supercomputer is now in production, setting a new scalability record for Allinea DDT, the debugger installed on more than 45 of the world’s top 100 supercomputers.
Blue Waters, a Cray supercomputer commissioned by the University of Illinois’s National Center for Science Applications (NCSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), is the world’s fastest supercomputer on a university campus with a theoretical capacity of 11.62 petaflops.
Blue Waters will be entirely available for open science. Projects will span the spectrum from the minute to the cosmic, everything from examining the structure of viruses to predicting the weather in outer space.
While getting the machine up to speed, the Blue Waters team ran its 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, said Lecomber – and having a debugger ready to deploy at large scales was critical to meeting the schedule. 'We knew our tool was more than ready,' he said.
'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.'
