Details
C and C++debugging and troubleshooting
C and C++ give you control over the details of data, access patterns, memory management and execution. But direct control over low level machine behavior leaves little margin for error when it comes to building and maintaining scalable scientific applications. TotalView products provide the ideal environment for troubleshooting complex C and C++ applications. They feature detailed views of objects, data structures and pointers, simplifying working with complex objects.
The standard template library (STL) collection classes simplify the way you manipulate your program's data, but they complicate troubleshooting when your program hangs or crashes. TotalView's Type Transformation Facility (TTF) provides a flexible way for you to provide alternate displays for data objects. STLView transformations provide a logical view of STL collection class objects, providing a more practical view of list data. The end result is a simplified, intuitive view into the structure and behavior of your code.
Fortran debugging
While there are some things that both C and Fortran have in common, Fortran is not C. TotalView correctly represents Fortran notation, types, and concepts, such as common blocks and modules, that are not present in other languages.
Fortran is especially good at representing and manipulating numerical and mathematical data. One of its key characteristics is its facility for representing array data. Scientists and engineers working with Fortran source code are doing so in part to take advantage of language-level support for things like multi-dimensional arrays, array assignment, and the powerful features of Fortran pointers. Our technology can help you leverage these key attributes of Fortran to ensure working code.
Data visualization for understanding application behavior, computational data and patterns
Most of the applications you are developing are engines for manipulating data. Whether observational or computational, it is the data that you really care about. When you are trying to develop insight into the behavior of a physical system you approach it quantitatively. The same approach is necessary when trying to understand the behavior of computational systems.
Troubleshooting involves exploring the behavior of a live application, looking for clues as to why the computation is not proceeding as expected, slicing the data presented in different ways to uncover patterns. It is critical that you have the tools that make it easy to view and manipulate that data, and TotalView products help streamline this process.
Debugging memory leaks and malloc errors
The fact that memory is a limited resource has a significant impact on the implementation of your application, especially when it contains millions of lines of code. As program complexity grows, memory leak debugging and troubleshooting malloc errors become more difficult. Memory-related code defects can cause out-of-control resource and random data corruption. Memory errors can also manifest themselves as random program crashes, negatively impacting productivity. In a worst-case scenario, memory errors can result in corrupted data causing programs to generate inaccurate results. Our TotalView tools help you manage that risk by ensuring working code and accurate results.
Support for MPI, OpenMP and other parallel paradigms
TotalView technology provides comprehensive support for MPI, OpenMP, UPC and GA. With support for more than 20 implementations of MPI, TotalView has been the debugger of choice in parallel programming courses. We support advancement in understanding parallelism through our TotalView Express Student program, which provides complimentary TotalView software to university students.
Multi-threaded applications / multi-core architectures
The era of increasing clock rates has ended. Today's processor architectures are characterized by multi-core and many-core designs. Building a multi-threaded application or transitioning from a serial application to a parallel application presents significant challenges. TotalView and ReplayEngine are natively built to help you manage the challenges presented by concurrency, parallelism and threads.
Race conditions are a common problem, even in a well tested multi-threaded application. You can use locks, semaphores and atomic operations to avoid race conditions, but they can introduce subtle problems of their own. Our tools provide visibility into the behavior of your code, increasing your understanding of the impact of these problems.
TVScript
TVScript is a framework for non-interactive debugging with TotalView. You define a series of events that may occur within the target program, TVScript loads the program under its control, sets breakpoints as necessary, and runs the program. At each program stop, TVScript gathers data which is logged to a set of output files for your review when the job has completed. If you call TVScript with no arguments, it provides usage guidelines and a listing of available events and actions. TVScript has been likened to
printf on steroids.
Graphic Processor Support
The TotalView for CUDA add-on feature for Linux-x86-64 supports:
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Debugging host and device code in the same session
- CUDA running directly on Tesla or Fermi hardware
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Full visibility to the hierarchical device, block, and thread memory
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Navigating device threads by logical and device coordinates
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Support for CUDA function calls, host pinned memory regions and CUDA contexts
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Command line interface (CLI) commands for CUDA functions
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Applications that use multiple NVIDIA devices at the same time
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MPI applications on CUDA-accelerated clusters
Remote display
The scientific community's demand for extreme computational power is not always met because of the difficulty of connecting to host machines, which are sometimes in another time zone, or on another continent. TotalView provides integrated remote display capability to help you fill that void.
SSH encryption gives you secure, rapid access to TotalView and MemoryScape without a local copy license. Connect from a Windows or Linux desktop or laptop to any server or supercomputer architecture that's running TotalView and MemoryScape.
- Easy to set up
- Save, load, and share connection profiles
- End-user installation
Download these free plugins to use TotalView on a remote server:
- Remote Display Client, Windows Installer, version 1.3.1 (Win-32)
- Remote Display Client, version 1.3.1 (Linux-x86-64, Linux-x86)
- Remote Display Client, Mac Installer, version 1.3.1 (Darwin-x86)