Allinea Software Releases DDTLite Debugging Tool Add-In for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
New tool provides developers total control of parallel and multi-thread applications.
Warwick, United Kingdom – Allinea Software, a leading provider of innovative products for large-scale scalar and parallel high performance computing applications, today announced the release of DDTLite, a truly parallel debugging plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.
"We are delighted to have Allinea's DDTLite plug-in available for Visual Studio 2008," says Shahrokh Mortazavi, Architect for Microsoft's Windows HPC Group. "Allinea has the leading parallel debugger technology for clusters, and its plug-in for Visual Studio 2008 dramatically shortens the time it takes to troubleshoot MPI programs."
DDTLite's unique parallel stack view enables developers to view the location of every process and thread simultaneously, compare values and variables, and group them based on code logic. Breakpoints for processes and threads can be set quickly and easily individually, by user-selected groups or as a whole. DDTLite also automatically labels processes with their MPI rank rather than their system process ID for faster problem-solving.
"Features such as variable lamination, parallel stacks, and group-wise pause/step/continuation enable developers to quickly understand MPI program behavior, locate bugs and fix them," says Mortazavi.
The product had been in beta testing for the past few months with a number of academic, research and business organizations. "Individual control and inspection of processes and threads is absolutely a must-have feature for a parallel debugger," said Christian Terboven, Project Lead for HPC on Windows at the Center for Computing and Communication at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and a key participant in the beta testing for DDTLite. "We found the DDTLite plug-in from Allinea to greatly improve the MPI debugging experience with Visual Studio 2008."
DDTLite has been added to Microsoft’s recently-released HPC SDK Toolkit. "With the rapid adoption of multi core technology, lots of Microsoft-based platform code need to be parallelized. DDTLite now allows Visual Studio 2008 programmers at all levels to develop and to debug in parallel using threads and/or MPI without changing their tools," says Jacques Philouze, Allinea’s VP of Sales and Marketing. "The product is available from an entry-level license that allows multi-threaded debugging on a single workstation to a more complete solution to be used on larger cluster at a very cost-effective price."
DDTLite can be purchased online at the Allinea website (http://www.allinea.com).
Also available on the website is a white paper written by Allinea entitled Parallel Debugging is Easy, which describes DDTLite's innovative debugging techniques and shows how parallel debugging can be as easy as scalar debugging.
About Microsoft Corporation
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
About Allinea Software
Based in Warwick (UK), with subsidiaries in the U.S and Germany, Allinea Software is a leading supplier of tools for multi-core and high performance computing (HPC). The company was founded by computer scientists from Warwick and Oxford Universities, giving them unrivalled expertise in large-scale parallel computing. Allinea's products are used at commercial, government and academic sites worldwide, and set new standards for affordability and ease-of-use in parallel and multi-core programming. With new product features aimed at multi-threaded applications, novel computing architectures, including the release of DDTLite for Visual Studio 2008, Allinea is bringing its wealth of experience in parallel tools to the rapidly-expanding arena of multi-core processing.
Allinea Software will be an exhibitor at the Supercomputing Conference (SC2008) in Austin, Texas from November 15-21, 2008.
For further information
Contact Jacques Philouze, VP of Sales and Marketing, Allinea Software at +44 (0) 1926 623231 or jacques@allinea.com.
