Weston Geophysical conducts seismic research in nuclear test and CO2 sequestration monitoring. One of the company's areas of research is in the development of parallel applications that simulate seismic waves in the Earth, which requires highly advanced computing power. The code involved in writing these applications can be especially challenging to debug and coding errors can lead to instabilities; without an effective, efficient parallel debugger, the source of these instabilities can be very difficult to identify.

"One of the primary reasons that we chose to use TotalView is because of its long-standing reputation as the most comprehensive debugger available for parallel software", stated Jim Lewkowicz, president of Weston Geophysical. "The TotalView Debugger also allows us to add features to our code that we could not have added successfully without it."

TotalView Debugger is a comprehensive source code and optional memory debugging solution that dramatically enhances and simplifies the process of debugging parallel, data-intensive, multi-process, multi-threaded or network-distributed applications. Built to handle the complexities of the world's most demanding applications, TotalView Debugger supports hybrid applications that utilize OpenMP and MPI to make efficient use of multi-core clusters.

TotalView Debugger debugs applications built from components that may have been written in different languages (FORTRAN 90 and C++, for example) and then compiled with different compilers (Intel and GCC, for example) but run together as a single executable. TotalView Debugger is robust and easy to use, with an intuitive GUI that helps users quickly isolate and identify the root cause of problems.

The TotalView Debugger provides Weston Geophysical developers with the ability to easily view, actively query and precisely control the multiple processes and threads in its seismic simulation code. With TotalView, Weston Geophysical is able to debug across multiple processors, setting breakpoints and evaluating variable values at each time iteration. Information about the state of MPI message queues is gathered and displayed, simplifying the diagnosis and resolution of MPI interprocess communication deadlocks. TotalView also includes powerful memory debugging capabilities that are especially effective on parallel, memory-intensive and long-running applications. As a result, Weston Geophysical has found that its developers' ability to debug new features in the code has been greatly enhanced.

"One of the strengths of TotalView that our customers consistently communicate to us is its ability to solve problems quickly in complex parallel development environments", stated Chris Gottbrath, product manager at TotalView Technologies. "TotalView's ability to dramatically speed development times in the seismic modelling software being developed by Weston Geophysical is yet another compelling example of the value of this capability."