Etnus Totalview To Support Ia-64 And Intel Compilers For Linux - Etnus TotalView debugger - Product Announcement

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Nov 26, 2001

Etnus, a supplier of debuggers for complex code, recently announced that the Etnus TotalView debugger will support Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor architecture.

In addition, TotalView will also support Intel's recently released compilers for Linux - Intel C Compiler 5.0 for Linux and Intel Fortran Compiler 5.0 for Linux. TotalView support for IA-32 compilers will be available spring of 2002. TotalView support for the Itanium architecture and complementary compilers will be available fall of 2002.

The Itanium processor's floating-point performance, 64-bit addressing, and large cache memory are well suited to technical computing markets such as weather prediction, petroleum, digital animation, and telecommunications. These markets have a strong need for Etnus TotalView's advanced debugging capabilities for message passing, multithreaded, and other complex codes, even those that incorporate large amounts of data.

Compilers are software development tools that translate commands written by programmers into code that can be run on computers, such as Intel's IA-64. Debuggers are also software development tools used by programmers to both speed application development and to make sure applications are running correctly. To many developers, debuggers rank as the most important tool for the timely development of application software.

TotalView is a fully featured, source level, graphical debugger providing application developers with complete control over applications. It has features that simplify development of large or complex applications and offers unrivaled support for applications that use message passing, multithreading, OpenMP and other parallel programming techniques that enable applications on both distributed memory and shared memory multiprocessor computers.

TotalView will support Intel compilers for Linux on both the Intel Itanium architecture and IA-32 architectures, such as the Intel Pentium 4 processor. Complexity, parallelism, and the sheer size of an application can add to the challenge programmers face in making application logic work the way it should. TotalView is designed for such environments, especially when parallelism is employed and in situations where developers are taking applications from 32-bit systems to larger, faster 64-bit systems such as those based on the Itanium processor. When porting to 64-bit architectures, software engineers commonly experience problems with constructs like C pointers as well as data originally written to align on 32-bit boundaries. TotalView's advanced language support, parallel support, and data analysis features ease the debugging involved in these ports.

"We are planning to deploy our parallel simulator on a Linux cluster," states Jim Owens, Chevron. "Without a parallel debugger such as Totalview for the Intel Fortran compiler, providing support for our parallel simulator will be extremely difficult, if not impossible."

Etnus first released TotalView for Linux in January of 2000 to satisfy demand for advanced software development tools on Linux systems. To date in 2001, Etnus has seen a 300% increase in demand for TotalView on Linux over the same period last year. "The availability of the rich feature set and advanced capabilities of Etnus TotalView for complex codes, along with the sophisticated compilers Intel offers, will facilitate application development for a broad range of current and new Intel users on Linux," says Rich Collier, Vice President, Engineering, Etnus.

The Intel compilers are specifically designed to help developers fully utilize the architectural innovations in the Intel Itanium and IA-32 processors, allowing for easy access to all of the performance features of Intel's latest processors. "Intel compilers for Linux fit easily into the way application developers work today and offer a number of optimization features that improve application performance," said Jon Khazam, director of performance tool operations for Intel's Software Solutions Group. "We are excited to be working with Etnus to bring together two powerful tools for the benefit Linux-based application developers everywhere."