Allinea Software blog

In June 2009, Allinea announced a collaboration with the French organization CEA. We agreed to scale Allinea DDT up to debug 32,000 simultaneous cores - at this time this covered 98% of the systems in the TOP500.

Up until then Allinea DDT had used a simple, flat architecture similar to many traditional web servers of the time. Our GUI ran on a frontend node and received connections from each of the compute nodes, processed and visualized the data and sent out new commands.

To reach 32,000 processes it was clear that a change in Allinea DDT's architecture was required - after all, even high-traffic websites were using load-balancers to spread requests amongst a network of servers for processing. We had to do this in reverse - instead of having thousands of users sending requests to a single service, we had thousands of services sending data to a single user.

Allinea DDT already performed a lot of data aggregation before displaying this information to the user - clearly, even at moderate scales of hundreds of processes, you can't look at each one in turn. Way back in Allinea DDT 1.10 we started addressing this by introducing a parallel stack view, which shows you the broad picture of where your processes are - without overwhelming you with the specifics.

We humans can survive in almost every environment on our planet and are beginning to step off it. We command fire hotter than the core of a star and freeze atoms at temperatures cooler than the depths of interstellar space. Not bad for squishy sacks of mostly water...

We can do all this because we love tools - we make them, we use them; they complete us.
At Allinea we spend all day, every day, crafting ever-better tools - in particular tools for working in the virtual environment inside computers. Our favourite ones are Allinea DDT, for finding and fixing problems on everything from a mobile ARM processor up to a 225,000 core supercomputer, and Allinea OPT, for effortlessly measuring and improving performance.

This week, we released Allinea DDT 3.1, the culmination of ten years of learning about and creating tools for parallel debugging.