
ARM extends HPC offering with acquisition of Allinea Software - drydot
https://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-extends-hpc-offering-with-acquisition-of-software-tools-provider-allinea-software.php
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kalleth
I got my first dev job after Uni at the sister company to Allinea, so I know
and have had a beer or three with most of the people involved.

Will admit to having worked near them for nearly 2 years and still not
understanding fully what they do (a cloud distributed debugger for HPC
workloads, iirc) but I can tell you this isn't a unicorn growth startup --
they've been working hard on this for over a decade.

Congrats all!

~~~
moconnor
Thanks! It's been an incredible journey ;-)

One of the less obvious benefits of joining ARM is having extra sites to
recruit developers at. Adding Manchester and potentially Cambridge to the
existing two sites is cool.

~~~
rasz_pl
>It's been an incredible journey

oh, so they are firing all of you and shutting down the company?

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moconnor
Allinea product manager and ex debugger dev here, ARM is very serious about
the server market and this is a small part of that larger plan.

I was surprised and pleased to see us on Hacker News - happy to answer any
questions!

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yalogin
Can someone tell me what Allinea does? What does providing software for HPC
mean?

~~~
gnufx
Their web site might give a clue that they produce a parallel debugger and
profiler integrated with an (Eclipse PPT-like?) GUI. The debugger is based on
launching instances of gdb (which isn't trivial at scale).

More to the point, can someone tell me why I should use the profiler rather
than the free/gratis tools, like TAU? Their salesman couldn't.

While a full parallel debugger is clearly useful in difficult cases, easily
the most useful debugging tool is stack traces, perhaps from openmpi's
automatic backtrace or LLNL's STAT. I don't know whether Totalview
(proprietary alternative to DDT) was ever seriously used when we had it
available to a multi-site project.

From what I recall of prices, if you're going to buy the tools for more cores
than on the sort of single node we have, you're talking something like my
salary. Then, in practice most university users won't measure or debug anyway,
and may not accept deadlock as a concept when systems people do.

~~~
moconnor
With reluctance, since you ask TAU is a great tool for performance experts but
few scientists have the expertise to use it. MAP is designed for them.

Plus the multi-core support is damn cool.

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jcbeard
slightly less editorialized from Top500 news:
[https://www.top500.org/news/arm-buys-hpc-software-
toolmaker-...](https://www.top500.org/news/arm-buys-hpc-software-toolmaker-
allinea/)

~~~
to3m
"More than £18m": [http://www.insidermedia.com/insider/midlands/mercia-exits-
wa...](http://www.insidermedia.com/insider/midlands/mercia-exits-warwick-
software-firm-in-18m-sale)

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barcoder
HPC = High Performance Computing

[http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/definition/high-...](http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/definition/high-
performance-computing)

~~~
Nomentatus
Good on you. I was a bit shocked that ARM left that uninterpreted on their
website; poor manners if nothing else.

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aisofteng
The linked article's headline,

>ARM extends HPC offering with acquisition of software tools provider Allinea
Software

is not editorialized at all. OP, are you a marketing person for ARM?

~~~
cgvgffyv
Well, what else would they spend the coin for? So they could have bigger pizza
parties?

Also compare word count.

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m_mueller
Reminds me a lot of Nvidia buying Portland Group, although that was probably a
better match. I don't really see this making much difference - what AMD needs
in HPC is tooling for their GPU/APU that covers a wide range of usecases, is
stable and performant. Publications and then sales pretty much follow
automatically, but IMO so far the tooling was the missing element. E.g.
where's my Fortran API for OpenCL and Nvidia? How do I debug and profile this?
What about device memory aware MPI wrappers? BLAS on device? Etc.

Allinea AFAIK only helps with the debugging/profiling part - but first you
need a sensible programming model.

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ginko
This is about ARM, not AMD.

~~~
m_mueller
Dangit, so much news about AMD lately ;). Funnily enough my comment still
applies (I think).

