Case Study: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieves scalable development of Grand Challenge applications on IBM Blue Gene with Rogue Wave Software's TotalView

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - Customer Case Study

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) develops mission‑critical Grand Challenge applications on the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, but these large, mixed‑language codes (C/C++/Fortran) that run on thousands of processors present extreme debugging and scaling challenges — crashes at scale, complex communication patterns and subtle memory bugs. To address this, LLNL adopted Rogue Wave Software’s TotalView debugger to gain scalable, parallel-aware debugging support.

Rogue Wave Software delivered TotalView, a multithreaded debugger built for MPI/OpenMP applications that can handle from single processes up to thousands (users report effective use on 4,096+ processors and across Blue Gene runs). TotalView’s conditional breakpoints, memory‑write trapping, independent thread control and aggregate/individual stepping helped LLNL find hard bugs faster, enabled codes to scale to full machine sizes, and reduced development time in some areas by more than 20%.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory