Visual Studio 2010 Adds Support for Debugging, Profiling, Analyzing Parallel Applications
Parallel programming gets a big boost in Visual Studio 2010. S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division describes how Visual Studio 2010 supports Debugging, Profiling and Analyzing Parallel Applications in his blog post. He provides a good tour of features.
Debugging. You can select a cluster head node, how many cores you want, and type F5 to debug your MPI program. The feature is available in Visual Studio 2008 through a plug-in and has been incorporated into Visual Studio 2010. One Microsoft partner, Allinea, has created an Allinea’s add-in that enables streamlined MPI-specific debugging.
Service Oriented Architecture Debugging. Windows HPC Server 2008 introduced Cluster SOA, which was built on WCF with advanced scheduling and load balancing provided by HPC’s scheduler/broker. In Visual Studio 2010, you can select a head node, debug nodes and services, deploy runtime libraries and clean up automatically.
Profiling. In Visual Studio 2010, you can get insight into performance though profiling tools integrated with the HPC job scheduler to help analyze the behavior of a particular MPI rank or node. In addition, Microsoft partners have created Vampir that allows you to troubleshoot message ordering and delays.
For more details and screenshots, see Debugging, Profiling and Analyzing Parallel Applications.
To find out more about Windows HPC programming models, visit the Windows HPC Server Developer Resource Center. You can find a suite of samples that use various parallel programming models on the CodePlex Parallel Dwarfs site.
You can learn more about Visual Studio 2010 Beta and get access to the download from Visual Studio 2010 Overview.
Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation