The Parallel Tools Platform (PTP, http://eclipse.org/ptp) provides tools that can assist in software development for parallel computer systems. While the PTP's runtime and debug perspectives provide assistance in the execution and debugging of parallel programs, the developer has to program the parallel code first! The PLDT portion of PTP provides tools to aid in this development, and can even stand alone without the rest of PTP. Initial tools in PLDT include aids for writing parallel programs in the two most common parallel programming paradigms: MPI (Message Passing Interface) for cluster and distributed memory systems, and OpenMP for shared memory and multi-core machines -- altho they are not strictly for these different architectures and in fact are often used together. These tools augment the content assist, context sensitive help, and documentation features that CDT provides for C and C++ code, and Photran provides for Fortran. The newest features go a step further and provide static analysis to detect common problems in parallel codes. Analysis of MPI barrier statements finds matching barriers, detects locations where the program could deadlock, and shows a path through the code that could cause the problem. Analysis of OpenMP code detects several common problems based on OpenMP usage, and concurrency analysis can determine what portions of the program can execute in parallel. I will also discuss recent contributions to the CDT that we implemented for our analysis, and how they can be used for other analysis of C/C++ code.

Beth R. Tibbitts is a 28+ year veteran of software development in IBM, including APL and LISP, both underdog languages and environments, and eventually C++ and Java. Beth worked on Expert Systems tools in her early days at IBM Research. She then worked in debugger development. Beth wrote Java book reviews and articles for the IBM developerworks site in its earlier days. She developed software in Java for IBM "Reinventing Education" grants, for training/evaluation of ADHD children, and for making web sites more accessible to persons with disabilities. She became a fan of Eclipse a few years ago and has written tools for programmers and users including tools for porting C and C++ programs to Linux, and now in the area of High Performance and High Productivity Tools. Beth is a committer on the Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) Eclipse project.