The organization of modern HPC systems often makes it difficult to deploy tools such as TotalView. For example, the compute nodes in a cluster may not have access to any X libraries or X forwarding, so launching a GUI on a compute node is not possible.

Using the Reverse Connect feature, you can run the TotalView UI on a front-end node to debug a job executing on compute nodes.

The basic process is to embed the tvconnect command in a batch script; when the batch job runs, the tvconnect process connects with the TotalView client to start the debugger server process on the batch node. The TotalView client would typically run on a front-end node, where the application is built and batch jobs are submitted.