Beth R. Tibbitts

An integrated approach to improving the parallel application development process

The development of parallel applications is becoming increasingly important to a broad range of industries. Traditionally, parallel programming was a niche area that was primarily exploited by scientists trying to model extremely complicated physical phenomenon. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that continued hardware performance improvements through clock scaling and feature-size reduction are simply not going to be achievable for much longer. The hardware vendors approach to addressing this issue is to employ parallelism through multi-processor and multi-core technologies. While there is little doubt that this approach produces scaling improvements, there are still many significant hurdles to be overcome before parallelism can be employed as a general replacement to more traditional programming techniques. The Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) Project was created in 2005 in an attempt to provide developers with new tools aimed at addressing some of the parallel development issues. Since then, the introduction of a new generation of peta-scale and multi-core systems has highlighted the need for such a platform. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges facing parallel application developers, present the current state of PTP, and provide a simple case study that demonstrates how PTP can be used to locate a potential deadlock situation in an MPI code.

GEM: graphical explorer of MPI programs

Formal dynamic verification can complement MPI program testing by detecting hard-to-find concurrency bugs. In previous work, we described our dynamic verifier called In-situ Partial Order (ISP) that can parsimoniously search the execution space of an MPI program while detecting important classes of bugs. One major limitation of ISP, when used by itself, is the lack of a powerful and widely usable graphical front-end. We now present a new tool called Graphical Explorer of MPI Programs (GEM) that overcomes this limitation. GEM is a plug-in architecture that greatly enhances the usability of ISP, and serves to bring ISP within reach of a wide array of programmers with its original release as part of the Eclipse Foundation’s Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) Version 3.0 in December, 2009. GEM is now a part of the PTP End-User Runtime. This paper describes GEM’s features, its architecture, and usage experience summary of the ISP/GEM combination. Recently, we applied this combination on a widely used parallel hypergraph partitioner. Even with modest amounts of computational resources, the ISP/GEM combination finished quickly and intuitively displayed a previously unknown resource leak in this code-base. Here, we also describe the process and benefits of using GEM throughout the development cycle of our own test case, an MPI implementation of the A* search. We conclude with a summary of our future plans.

Intentional MPI programming in a visual development environment

BladeRunner is a research project that explores the use of intentional and code generative approaches to facilitate programming in MPI (Message Passing Interface) for parallel and distributed programming. The BladeRunner development environment provides an interactive visual approach based on figures representing higher level abstractions of MPI artifacts. This, along with direct manipulation of visual abstractions, allows the user to both view and express coding intentions clearly and rapidly. As a constructive programming paradigm, direct manipulation of figures translates into coding actions reflected into generated program code. Thus, programming focus is higher level, on visual representations for MPI programming concepts, and evolution of program state reflected in diagrams, instead of syntax or language structure details.We describe the BladeRunner prototype tool, built upon the Eclipse open-source platform, and discuss the vision for this work.

The Eclipse parallel tools platform: toward an integrated development environment for XSEDE resources

Eclipse [1] is a widely used, open source integrated development environment that includes support for C, C++, Fortran, and Python. The Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) [2] extends Eclipse to support development on high performance computers. PTP allows the user to run Eclipse on her laptop, while the code is compiled, run, debugged, and profiled on a remote HPC system. PTP provides development assistance for MPI, OpenMP, and UPC; it allows users to submit jobs to the remote batch system and monitor the job queue. It also provides a visual parallel debugger. The XSEDE community comprises a large part of PTPs user base, and we are actively working to make PTP a productive, easy-to-use development environment for the full breadth of XSEDE resources. In this paper, we will describe capabilities we have recently added to PTP to better support XSEDE resources. These capabilities include submission and monitoring of jobs on systems running Sun/Oracle Grid Engine, support for GSI authentication and MyProxy logon, support for environment modules, and integration with compilers from Cray and PGI. We will describe ongoing work and directions for future collaboration, including OpenACC support and parallel debugger integration.

Improving UPC productivity via integrated development tools

In the world of high-performance computing (HPC), there has been an increased focus in recent years upon the importance of productivity in HPC application development. One crucial aspect of productivity is the programming model used, and the family of partitioned global-address-space (PGAS) models, such as UPC and X10, has served to advance the state of the art in balancing performance and productivity. Also of great importance is the variety of development tools used to support activities such as editing, debugging, and optimizing programs. These tools are often most useful as part of an integrated development environment (IDE). While some progress has been made towards bringing IDE capabilities into the HPC world, in particular by way of Eclipse projects, support has mainly focused on MPI and OpenMP tools. In this paper, we present research and development activities that are bringing Eclipse-based IDE capabilities to the PGAS developer community. We focus on tools for UPC, giving background on previously existing capabilities to work with UPC programs in Eclipse and then presenting a tool-chain and project wizard for the open-source Berkeley UPC compiler, basic UPC static analysis tools, and integration of our performance analysis tool (Parallel Performance Wizard) supporting UPC. Finally, we conclude by proposing future work and providing recommendations for further integration of UPC and other PGAS tools to enhance overall developer productivity.