Chapter 1 Getting Started

Rogue Wave NextGen TotalView for HPC is the next generation user interface for the TotalView debugger. Behind the NextGen TotalView for HPC user interface is the TotalView debugging engine, the long standing industry leader for debugging massively parallel programs in the HPC arena.

The NextGen user interface is provided as part of TotalView’s Early Experience program. The goal of this program is to allow existing users to try out the new interface and provide feedback about its current capabilities—in particular to offer input on features required for day-to-day use.

Each new release will include additional functionality based on a priority list that you can help influence. Please send email to tv-beta@roguewave.com with your feedback and feature priorities.

Try out the new user interface in three ways:

2. To launch the new UI for a single instance of TotalView, simply add the -newUI switch after the totalview command, for example:

Currently, the next generation UI is supported only on Linux x86 64-bit platforms. It fully supports multi-process and multi-threaded debugging but does not yet support MPI or CUDA debugging. It also does not include some features like evaluation, barrier and watchpoints. However, all these traditional TotalView features are accessible through the Command Line Interface (CLI), which is available in the NextGen TotalView for HPC user interface through the Command Line view. Depending on the tools you use, the functionality may not appear in the user interface yet.

NextGen TotalView for HPC incorporates ReplayEngine technology. With this feature engaged, you can go backwards in the debugging session to find, for example, where an obviously incorrect variable value went wrong.

NextGen TotalView for HPC supports C++11 features for the GNU compiler, including support for lambdas, transformations for smart pointers, auto types, R-Value references, range-based loops, strongly-typed enums, initializer lists, user defined literals, and transformations for many of the containers such as array, forward_list, tuple and others.

Most of the information you need to use NextGen TotalView for HPC is available through the User Guide (this document). If you are interested in features of the debugging engine not yet supported in the newUI, consult the NextGen TotalView for HPC Reference Guide, which details all of the commands available in the Command Line view. Remember, though, that while the commands can be expected to execute successfully, in many cases you will see no reflection of the results in the UI. To see the results of unsupported commands, use associated commands that display those results in the Command Line view.

These are the major areas of CLI functionality not yet supported by the UI:

If you need these features, launch the traditional TotalView for HPC simply by running the totalview executable, for example:

NOTE >> If you are using TVNEWUI to control the UI for TotalView for HPC and would like to run the traditional interface, make sure TVNEWUI is either unset or set to False.

For information on contacting Rogue Wave, conventions used in the documentation, and documentation for TotalView for HPC, see Appendix D, "Resources".

The documentation for TotalView for HPC could be useful if you are using features not yet supported in the NextGen TotalView for HPC UI by invoking commands through the Command Line Interface (CLI). The commands themselves are described in the Reference Guide, but the TotalView for HPC documentation, in particular the User Guide, can provide useful information on how to use the commands to best advantage in debugging scenarios. This documentation is available in your TotalView for HPC distribution, or on the Rogue Wave web site.