The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced that the Krell Institute has been awarded the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) PathForward Open|SpeedShop phase II contract through Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Over the next two years, the Krell Institute and the DOE tri-laboratories of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) intend to continue building the product to focus on scalability, alternative performance data collection methods, alternative performance data display technologies and reliability.

“Krell is extremely pleased to participate in this development effort, and we will be working with the Department of Energy and industry to make Open|SpeedShop a sustainable open source software product for the high-end computing community.” said John Ziebarth, Vice President of the Krell Institute.

Aimed at making sophisticated open-source performance tools available to government laboratories, universities and researchers, the Open|SpeedShop project was launched in 2004 as a joint project of the DOE NNSA and Silicon Graphics, in collaboration with an advisory board consisting of LLNL, LANL and SNL. Open|SpeedShop utilizes dynamic instrumentation technology developed at the University of Wisconsin and University of Maryland. The infrastructure and base components of Open|SpeedShop are released as open source code under GPL and LGPL.

Open|SpeedShop is an open source, multi-platform Linux® performance tool which is targeted to support performance analysis of applications running on both single node and large scale systems with Intel® and AMD™ processors, including Intel Pentium®, Xeon™, Itanium® 2 and AMD Opteron™ CPUs. Open|SpeedShop is explicitly designed with usability in mind and is for application developers and computer scientists. The base functionality includes program counter (PC) sampling, exclusive and inclusive user time, CPU hardware performance counter, MPI event tracing, I/O call tracing, and Floating Point exception experiments. In addition, Open|SpeedShop is designed to be modular and extensible. It supports several levels of plug-ins, which allow users to add their own performance experiments.

Additional information on Open|SpeedShop can be found online at http://www.openspeedshop.org . The Krell Institute and the DOE ASC will be featuring the project in a half-day tutorial and offering demonstrations at the 2006 SuperComputing Conference in Tampa, FL November 12-17.

Since its inception in 1997, the Krell Institute has been providing superior technical resources, knowledge and experience in managing technology-based education and information programs. Krell successfully manages two outstanding fellowship programs, educational outreach programs, and information management and exchange programs.