Case Study: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scales supercomputer debugging with Perforce TotalView

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scales debugging to 4,096 processors with Perforce

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) faced significant challenges in developing and debugging large-scale, mission-critical applications on its IBM Blue Gene supercomputers. The complexity of code running across thousands of processors made identifying bugs and scaling applications extremely difficult for their developers. To address this, LLNL turned to Perforce and its TotalView debugger.

Perforce's TotalView solution provided the scalable debugging capabilities LLNL needed, allowing developers to efficiently manage and inspect code across thousands of processes. The results included a drastic reduction in debugging time for complex issues, with one developer noting it was easy to use on 4,096 processors. The advanced features, such as trapping on specific memory writes and setting conditional breakpoints, helped LLNL scale its applications more quickly, reducing overall development time in some areas by more than 20 percent.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory