Comparison of Code Development Tools on Clusters

Edinburgh 09 Sep 99 The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre has published a report on "Comparison of Code Development Tools on Clusters", written by Lorna Smith. Smith tested tools in the categories: Profiles and Debuggers and compared their functionality and quality. Unfortunately, all tests were performed only on Sun Solaris systems, which limits the usability a little bit. Nevertheless the report provides good information on a number of tools.

There are many Performance Analysis tools available for clusters, ranging from freeware research products to supported commercial products. Smit compared:

Prism
Vampir
AIMS
MPICL and Paragraph
Pablo

Of the avialable profilers Prism and Vampir were the best options, due to a combination of features. Prism offers an ideal profilers for SUN systems. Vampir had the advantage of being portable to a wide range of systems and offered a wider range of visualisation options.

Prism and Vampir are commercial. From the freeeware products, Smit h considered a combination of MPICL and Paragraph best.

In te Debuggers comparison, Smith only looked at parallel debuggers for Fortan and C MPI codes. The debuggers tested were:

Prism
Totalview
MQM
Panorama
XMPI

There are many more debuggers, for instance PDT, Guard, P2D2, Xmdb and Pangea, which were not tested.

The best debuggers tested were TotalView and Prism, which both proveded a lot a features and were stable. Of these Prism has the drawback of being only availabl on Sun. Totalview is a portable debugger. Both debuggers are commercially avilable.

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