P2 Using the Eclipse Parallel Tools platform in support of atmospheric sciences high performance computing

Alameda, Jay, University of Illinois

Eclipse [1] is a widely used, open source integrated development environment that includes support for C, C++, Fortran, and Python. The Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) [2] extends Eclipse to support development on high performance computers. PTP allows the user to run Eclipse on her laptop, while the code is compiled, run, debugged, and profiled on a remote high performance computing (HPC) system. PTP provides development assistance for MPI, OpenMP, and Unified Parallel C (UPC); it allows users to submit jobs to a remote batch system and monitor the job queue. It also provides a visual parallel debugger.

As part of a US National Science Foundation funded project to improve PTP to produce a productive Workbench for High Performance Computing, we have been making significant improvements in PTP to better support science and engineering code development on remote high performance computers. In this talk, we will describe how PTP works, how it can aid atmospheric scientists in code development and testing, and capabilities we have recently added to PTP to better support a diverse range of HPC resources. These capabilities include submission and monitoring of jobs on systems running Sun/Oracle Grid Engine, support for GSI authentication and MyProxy logon, support for environment modules, and integration with compilers from Cray and PGI. We will also describe our experiences using Eclipse to support development associated with numerical weather prediction codes such as WRF, in particular in support of WRF user code development, compilation and execution on remote HPC platforms. We will describe ongoing work and directions for future collaboration, including addressing some of the limitations in PTP’s Fortran support module, Photran, to better support code development and maintenance for codes such as WRF. These potential future directions, coupled with existing PTP capabilities, could provide opportunities to significantly enhance support of users wanting to extend and enhance codes like WRF, making it significantly easier to understand WRF and its complex structure.Finally, we will describe how PTP can be used to improve one’s software engineering practices for developing science and engineering codes.

[1] Eclipse – The Eclipse Foundation open source community website, [Online]. Available: http://www.eclipse.org/

[2] Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) [Online]. Available: http://www.eclipse.org/ptp/