The Parallel Tools Consortium

Recent conferences (including the DARPA/NSF 1993 Workshop on Instrumentation for Parallel Computer Systems, the HPCC Workshop on Grand Challenge Applications and Software Technology, and the 1993 ACM/ONR Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Debugging) have exposed the fact that parallel tool use is appallingly low among the high-performance computing community, despite increasingly vocal demands for software support. Three factors have been cited as critical:

• Current parallel tools do not respond to the specific needs of scientific users who must become quasi-computer scientists to understand and use the tools;

• Tools vary widely across current parallel platforms, so the steep learning curve must be repeated each time a user migrates to a new machine; and

• The lack of specialized support for heterogeneous or scalable applications also deters users from investing the effort needed to parallelize scientific libraries or applications that could be used by third parties.

The Parallel Tools Consortium brings together representatives from the federal, industrial, and academic sectors to address these issues. Our mission is to take a leadership role in defining, developing, and promoting parallel tools that meet the specific requirements of users who develop scalable applications on a variety of platforms. The Consortium was established in November 1993.

• Ptools Consortium Projects and How to Initiate Them
  • Approved Projects
    • Distributed Array Visualization
    • Lightweight Corefile Browser
    • Message Queue Manager
    • Parallel Unix Commands
    • Portable Timing Routines
  • Proposed Projects
    • None.

• Parallel Computing Meetings, Conferences, etc.
  • 2nd Annual Parallel Tools Consortium General Meeting

• How to Join the Ptools Consortium

• Ptools Steering Committee

• Ptools Consortium By-Laws

• Ptools Reflector Archive

• Parallel Tool Projects Around the World

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