Using the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform in Support of Earth Sciences High Performance Computing

Date and Time: 
2013 Wednesday, April 3
Location: 
CG1 Auditoriums
Speaker: 
Jay Alameda

Authors: Jay Alameda

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 high performance computing (HPC) system. PTP provides development assistance for MPI, OpenMP, and Unified Parallel C (UPC); it allows users to submit jobs to a remote batch system and monitor the job queue. It also provides a visual parallel debugger. As part of a US National Science Foundation funded project to improve PTP to produce a productive Workbench for High Performance Computing, we have been making significant improvements in PTP to better support science and engineering code development on remote high performance computers. In this talk, we will describe how PTP works, how it can aid earth scientists in code development and testing, and capabilities we have recently added to PTP to better support a diverse range of HPC 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 also describe our experiences using Eclipse to support development associated with earth sciences codes, including numerical weather prediction codes such as WRF, for instance in support of WRF user code development, compilation and execution on remote HPC platforms. We will describe ongoing work and directions for future collaboration, including OpenACC support and parallel debugger integration. Finally, we will describe how PTP can be used to improve one’s software engineering practices for developing science and engineering codes.

[1] Eclipse – The Eclipse Foundation open source community website 

[2] Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) website

Speaker Description: 

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 withadvanced 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.

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PDF icon Eclipse_WHPC_03Apr2013.pdf3.88 MB
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