The UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) has selected Rogue Wave Software’s ThreadSpotter to help optimise the code for its multicore processors. Chosen as a complementary product to TotalView, a GUI-based source code debugger that AWE has used for 14 years, ThreadSpotter is being used to analyse performance issues in code and provide recommendations on performance solutions.
Failure to efficiently use cache memory is a frequent cause of poor performance because the processor has to stall for many cycles waiting for data to be fetched from main memory. The only way to achieve full performance from the CPU is for data to be in the cache. Rogue Wave Software comments that unlike traditional profilers and performance-counter based tools that gather data, but provide little analysis, ThreadSpotter provides specific guidance on performance issues by identifying them, estimating each issue’s importance and rank ordering them. ThreadSpotter then guides the developer to the location in the source code where the issues are located. In many cases, it provides examples on how code or data structures can be refactored to achieve performance.
‘Atomic Weapons Establishment has chosen Rogue Wave’s ThreadSpotter because it simplifies cache optimisation, which is a key to achieving the best performance out of multi-core processors,’ stated Ken Atkinson, AWE’s HPC strategy manager. ‘AWE has already seen some significant improvements in code efficiencies that were identified using ThreadSpotter and the developers were delighted with the simplicity of utilising the tool.’
