"By offering Allinea Software's development tools for the Cell Broadband Engine architecture, IBM is helping enable application vendors eager to adopt new innovations to benefit from high-performance computing power and the unique capabilities of the Cell/B.E. processor", stated Paula Richards, director, IBM Cell Systems & Solutions.

"Programme development for such a new and innovative architecture can be complex, and application programmers very quickly embraced the DDT debugger. A big advantage was the portability of the tool, as our developers are already familiar with it on our AIX and Linux clusters", stated Dr. Bernd Mohr, leader of the programming environments and tools group of Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany, which was actively involved in the beta test of the product and now has licensed DDT for its 12-BladeCenter Cell/B.E. cluster.

"Novel heterogeneous processor architectures, such as Cell/B.E., are setting new challenges for software developers who need to fully exploit the performance available. This means development tools have an increasingly essential role, and must be able to present the programmer with a clear and comprehensive view of the status of a programme and the location of possible problems", stated Dr. David Lecomber, CTO of Allinea Software.

DDT and OPT offer users a common interface across multiple processor architectures, operating systems, compilers and languages, and support parallel computing paradigms such as MPI, OpenMP and threads.

"DDT now has specific capabilities for debugging PPEs and SPEs seamlessly within the same debugging session, providing increased levels of control over PPE and SPE threads and their data", stated Dr. Lecomber. "And our latest enhancements to the OPT profiler—including a statistical sampler, an intuitive time view of performance data metrics, and enhanced troubleshooting guide and error reporting - were developed specifically for Cell/B.E. platforms. OPT is really the only way to profile SPU code on Cell/B.E. processors."

Allinea provides a complete toolset for Cell software development and offers programmers an efficient way to reduce run times and queue wait times, allowing faster generate-and-test cycles for all users to help reduce costs.

OPT for Cell and DDT for Cell and workstations can now be purchased on-line at the Allinea website. In addition, Allinea has written a white paper about using OPT 1.4 to profile applications on the Cell /B.E. processor, which can also be downloaded from the Allinea website.

Allinea Software will be exhibiting at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2008) in Dresden, Germany from June 17-20, 2008.