For many HPC developers, developing, analyzing and tuning parallel scientific applications, on a variety of target platforms, involves a hodgepodge of disparate command line tools. Based on the successful open-source Eclipse integrated development environment, the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) combines tools for coding, debugging, job scheduling, monitoring, error detection, tuning, revision control and more into a single tool with a streamlined graphical user interface. PTP helps manage the complexity of HPC code development, optimization and monitoring on diverse platforms. This tutorial provides a hands-on introduction to Eclipse and PTP. Early sessions introduce code development in Eclipse: editing, building, launching and monitoring parallel applications in C and Fortran, support for efficient development of code on remote machines, and developing and analyzing code with a variety of languages and libraries. Later sessions focus on parallel debugging and performance optimization tools. Participants will inspect and analyze a real application code, profiling its execution and performance. Using tools such as Valgrind, Perf, GProf, GCov, LTTng, and TAU in the Eclipse environment will be covered.
Access to parallel system(s) for hands-on exercises on a local system (Yellowstone) is planned.
Bring a laptop and, if possible, pre-install Eclipse for Parallel Application Developers from http://eclipse.org/downloads. More information will be available at https://wiki.eclipse.org/PTP/tutorials
Jay Alameda is the lead for Advanced Application Support at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In this role, he works with the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) which is a collaboration of NSF-funded high performance computing (HPC) resource providers, working to provide a common set of services, including the provisioning of advanced user support, to the science and engineering community. Jay also works with the NSF-funded Track 1 project, Blue Waters, and in this role, has worked with advanced development tools (such as the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform) to support development and optimization of HPC applications on the Blue Waters resource. He is also leading the NSF funded SI2 project, “A Productive and Accessible Development Workbench for HPC Applications Using the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform”, which is working on a user- and application-centric plan to improve Eclipse PTP as a platform for development of HPC applications, with a particular focus on broadening support of a diverse range of HPC resources (especially across XSEDE) as well as undertaking a broad education, outreach and training agenda to increase the size of the community benefiting from the capabilities of Eclipse PTP.
Wyatt J. Spear is a software engineer at the University of Oregon's Performance Research Lab. There he helps develop and provide support for the Tuning and Analysis Utilities (TAU), a performance analysis system for high performance applications. He specializes in performance data collection, performance analysis tools and Eclipse tool integration. He is an Eclipse committer on the Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) project where he primarily works on the External Tools Framework, helping command line based tools find a place in the Eclipse UI. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Oregon, the latter received in 2004.
Beth R. Tibbittsis a software engineer in the Advanced Application Support Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications., where she continues her involvement with Eclipse/PTP and high-level tools for HPC developers.
Beth recently retired from 36+ years as a software engineer for IBM, with a wide range of experience in languages (from FORTRAN, APL and Lisp, to C/C++ and Java) and problem domains (Artificial Intelligence, debuggers, assessment tools for teachers, web tools for persons with disabilities, and tools for programmers in porting, and now develops tools for HPC programmers).
The primary focus of the last several years has been as one of the original committers on the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) that assists users in developing parallel applications in MPI, OpenMP, OpenSHMEM, and UPC. Beth has a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Western Kentucky University, and has taught classes, seminars, and tutorials including various IBM education programs, on APL, Expert Systems, Java, Eclipse, and PTP.
