Features:

ONLINE DATABASE AIDS PROGRAM PORTABILITY

The University of Tennessee - Innovative Computing Laboratory (http://cl.cs.utk.edu) and Coherent Cognition (http://coherentcognition.com) have developed an web-based online Portability Database to help scientists with application portability. Development of the database was supported by the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Programming Environment and Training (PET) project.

Dr. David Cronk of the University of Tennessee - ICL said: "Programming in MPI or OpenMP and writing programs using standard Fortran and C helps give programs that are portable across platforms." "Unfortunately, portability problems still occur." The database is designed to help people overcome these portability problems.

The database contains over 200 entries that describe issues that might occur when moving programs between platforms. There are sections devoted to C, Fortran, OpenMP, MPI, and more general topics. The entries range from simple links to additional information to full online articles written especially for the database.

The database can be accessed at http://coherentcognition.com/projects/port/db/. The database contains discussions of programming tools, information on unexpected compiler behaviors, a guide to Fortran compilers on various platforms, links to tutorials, porting case studies, discussions of methods to characterize compilers and MPI libraries, and guidelines for writing parallel programs. Also, there is an option for users to submit portability issues for investigation and submission into the database.

According to Dr. Tim Kaiser of Coherent Cognition: "We included the option for people to submit issues to us because we know there are a lot of people out there that have seen problems with portability. This gives them the chance to share their experiences." One purpose of collecting user submissions is to enable the documentation of instances of standard conforming program code snippets that are not portable. It is also used to collect information about common coding practices that can cause portability problems. Users can submit problem descriptions and example code segments. Coherent Cognition and the University of Tennessee - Innovative Computing Laboratory investigate the problems and report results in the Portability Database as appropriate.

The Portability Database allows anonymous logins. After logging in, users can move between various sections and subsections of the database. There is a list of "issues" in each section. Information can be viewed by selecting the issue. Some of the entries have code snippets that illustrate some problem or a workaround to a problem. These code snippets can be downloaded from a repository connected to the database.

Users can search the database using simple queries or create more complex filters to access entries of interest.

The development of the Portability Database is part of Application Portability project sponsored by DoD HPCMP.