The Parallel Tools Platform: A Development Environment For High Performance Computing
Greg Watson (IBM )
Making For Eclipse · Standard (25 mins)
Thursday, 15:20, 25 minutes | Winchester
Tags: Tools
Greg Watson
The Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) project aims to leverage the highly integrated, extensible, and world-class nature of the Eclipse platform in order to address a range of problems encountered when developing applications for parallel and high performance computer architectures. The latest parallel computer architectures place a significant burden on application developers who are attempting to maximize the performance and productivity of their codes, due to the complexity of the execution environment and the primitive nature of existing tools. The ability to scale to very large application sizes (hundreds of thousands of processes, terabytes of memory) is now feasible on these machines, and the need for exemplary development tools is becoming essential part of the development process.
PTP is an ambitious attempt to unify the current fragmented parallel development tools into a single integrated environment that harnesses the Eclipse platform as the core of a parallel tools framework. The project addresses five main areas that are important to parallel computing:
- Coding and static analysis tools that provide advanced error checking and analysis functions to simplify and improve the development of parallel applications.
- The ability to launch, monitor and control parallel applications on a wide range of parallel architectures and parallel environments.
- Extension of the core Eclipse debugging functionality to include the ability to debug parallel programs, in addition to conventional programs.
- An external tools framework to simplify the tight integration of existing tools for profiling, performance analysis, and other types of dynamic analysis into the Eclipse framework.
- Enhancement of the existing C/C++ language tools to include support for Fortran (used predominantly in parallel scientific applications), and in the future, other more specialized data parallel languages.
In addition, PTP now addresses the key requirement of parallel computing which is the development of applications remotely. The Remote Development Tools (RDT) sub-project now permits applications to be physically located, built, and executed, on a remote system using a local Eclipse installation.
This presentation will provide an overview of PTP, the status of the project, and the latest developments and contributions to the platform.
Greg Watson is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM and project leader for the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform Project. His research interests focus on tools for parallel computers, program debugging, distributed computing, and operating systems, which has led him to work in some strange places, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition to Eclipse, he has also contributed to other open source projects, such as the award winning Clustermatic Linux-based cluster management system and the LinuxBIOS project that aims to replace your proprietary BIOS with an open source alternative.