Absoft Corp. on Tuesday introduced FxP, a parallel debugger for mac OS X-based computer clusters that support Message Passing Interface (MPI), a commonly used standard for parallel programming. FxP is being released as a “technology preview,” and is billed as a low-cost parallel debugging solution.
With FxP, Fortran and C/C++ developers can more easily locate bugs in the parallel code on Mac clusters running Mac OS X “Panther” and “Tiger” operating systems, according to Absoft. The technology is based on Fx2, a serial debugger Absoft previously developed.
FxP supports debugging 64-bit and 32-bit code, both MPI and serial Fortran, C/C++ and Assembler programs from gnu, Intel, IBM, PathScale and, of course, Absoft itself. It features a graphical interface, and can attach to MPI processes, connect to remote batch jobs for debugging production jobs, view local and global variables, stack trace, registers and message queues and more.
Absoft plans to release the final version of FxP in the second half of 2005. Absoft has also committed to bringing FxP to Intel-based Apple hardware in 2006. The debugger will be included in Absoft’s recently announced HPC SDK for Apple clusters. Developers interested in getting the software now are encouraged to e-mail Absoft.