The HPCC software suite of products includes high performance compilers, parallel debuggers, data visualisers and performance profilers. High performance communication protocols and efficient MPI implementation provide the right framework to extract maximum performance. Single system image at the system management level ensures ease of administration and monitoring of large clusters.

The HPCC software consists of:

• Base Software, which includes a lightweight communication substrate, optimized MPI, and a parallel file system with MPI-10 interface.
• Program Development environment, providing a rich set of FORTRAN 77 / Fortran 90 program development tools, and an integrated debugging environment for parallel programs.
• System Management tools for monitoring the effective utilization of the cluster resources and for administration of large UNIX clusters.
• Software engineering tools for developing high quality programs.

Base Software

HPCC software provides lightweight communication protocols on the PARAMNet conforming to the Active Messages II specifications of the University of California Berkeley. The implementation decouples the communication path from the operating system and also allows experiments with new protocols and flow control mechanisms. It provides a communication abstraction, which allows the applications to exploit the low latency and high bandwidth of the underlying SAN network. On top of this low-level communication substrate, HPCC software provides Message Passing Interface (MPI) application programming interface for parallel computing and fast sockets interface for distributed computing.

Program Development

HPCC software provides an integrated Fortran program development environment, which includes the Fortran 90 compiler, debugger, source browser, profiler, project manager and FORTRAN 77 to Fortran 90 converter. CAF90 is a highly optimizing Fortran-go and FORTRAN-77 compiler developed jointly by C-DAC and Apogee Inc. It is fully ANSI X3.9:198 and ISO/IEC 15391991 compliant. C-F77to90 is an extremely powerful tool for migrating FORTRAN 77 programs to Fortran 90. For correctness and performance debugging of parallel applications the HPCC software provides DIViA (Debugger with Integrated Visualizer and Analyzer) that works under both PVM and MPI environments for both C or Fortran language parallel programs.

Debugging Environment

Correctness Debugging Components:

• Multiprocess Debugger - allows control of the execution of loosely synchronized, concurrently running multiple tasks as a related group of tasks with source level debugging facility.
• Message Debugger - allows users to inspect, modify, block and control the messages between the various tasks of a parallel application.
• Visual Debugger - provides visual feedback on the execution of a parallel program and portraying sequence of communication and status of participant tasks.

Performance Debugging Components:

• Automatic Bottleneck Detector helps in detecting the communication bottlenecks and their sources automatically, to help the user fine-tune the parallel application

System Management

The system management tool PARMON - allows the cluster user or administrator to monitor activities and resource utilization of various components of the cluster.

The Parallel Unix Commands PARCOM - is a tool for executing UNIX commands in a cluster environment on several processors at the same time.

Software Engineering

Also included in the HPCC software suite is the MetricAdvisor that calculates a variety of source code metrics, which is essential for generating quality code.