A supercomputing system is only as open and flexible as its software. The open and flexible software environment is an integral part of the PARAM OpenFrame Architecture. The architecture allows the parallel system to be viewed as an ensemble of independent workstations, a cluster of workstations, or as MPP systems connected through a scalable high bandwidth network, or any combination of these. In a parallel programming environment users normally look for openness, industry standards, supported by a spectrum of sophisticated development tools, that are robust, easy to use and flexible enough to address different application development requirements. Driven by this vision, the PARAM OpenFrame Architecture delivers a comprehensive range of software tools and utilities, which can be composed depending on specific needs. Integration of third party offerings is enmeshed in its software architecture.

The PARAM OpenFrame software is designed in such a way that the user can run existing sequential applications right away and develop and run new data parallel and message passing applications as soon as they are ready. The resource management and system administration tools keep the entire system running as efficiently as possible in a multi-user network environment. C-DAC HPCC software, the main component of the PARAM OpenFrame software, provides a flexible parallel and distributed software environment. The HPCC software suite of products includes high performance compilers, parallel debuggers, data visualizers, performance profilers and software engineering tools. Optimized MPI implementation and high performance communication protocols provide the right framework to extract maximum performance. For business computing, the software environment is also supported with standard databases, middleware, and powerful decision making tools.

For parallel applications with high performance requirements, C-DAC has specially developed its CCP protocols on PARAMNet, with latencies in the range of 10 microseconds. HPCC software’s KSHIPRA lightweight communication protocol supports low latency and high bandwidth communication primitives on the system area networks. This enabling technology is the key to the high level of aggregate system performance of the PARAM OpenFrame system area networks. The heart of KSHIPRA is the protected user level primitives – Active Messages. It conforms to the Active Messages II (AM-II) specifications of the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). Its implementation is an augmentation of the AM-II software provided by UCB. Unlike the TCP/IP and UDP/IP legacy protocols, Active Messages achieve higher performance by leveraging on the OS bypass mechanism. This allows the user applications to directly access the system area network hardware in the common case of sending/receiving messages.

For operating and program development environment, each workstation runs the Solaris Operating System. With the support of Solaris and TCP/IP, the system provides an environment which is functionally equivalent to a cluster of Solaris workstations over a LAN. Much of the software support available under a distributed Solaris environment becomes readily available on PARAM also. It includes system management, job management, storage management, databases, and message passing libraries. Also, with the PARAM OpenFrame providing workstation environment at the underlying node level, shrink-wrapped Solaris SPARC binaries run straightway on PARAM OpenFrame nodes.

A large cluster requires tools to manage the system effectively. In PARAM OpenFrame, the network of workstations are managed using SOLSTICE system management tools which include site management, network management, software management, storage management, configuration management, accounting, and security tools. For cluster of workstations, RTE ensures the efficient usage of workstations through batch queuing and load balancing of jobs. C-DAC HPCC software provides PARAMON – a comprehensive cluster monitoring system. It monitors the system both at node level and at the entire system level exhibiting a single system image. The PARCOM tool allows execution of UNIX commands on several nodes in the cluster at the same time.

For parallel computing, C-DAC provides the industry standard Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), Message Passing Interface (MPI) and application programming interfaces. C-MPI of HPCC software provides MPI collective algorithms tuned to a cluster of multiprocessor nodes. Also C-MPI achieves enhanced performance by layering MPI over KSHIPRA communication primitives.

C-DAC HPCC software provides an integrated FORTRAN program development environment which includes the FORTRAN-90 compiler, debugger, source browser, profiler and project manager. CAF90 is a highly optimizing FORTRAN-90 and FORTRAN-77 compilers developed jointly by C-DAC and Apogee Inc. C-F77 to 90 is an extremely powerful tool for converting FORTRAN-77 programs to FORTRAN-90. For developing quality code, the HPCC software provides the MetricAdvisor software engineering tools.

For those users familiar with the SUN Solaris program development tools, C-DAC supports Sun Workshop which features FORTRAN-90, FORTRAN-77 and C compilers, SparcWorks parallelization tools for multiprocessor nodes and code management tools for distributed development. Also included is the SPARC VISUAL WORKSHOP for C++ which is an integrated visualization development tool covering C and C++ compilers, GUI builder and code management tools and multithreaded applications development tools.

For correctness and performance debugging of parallel applications the HPCC software provides DIViA (Debugger with Integrated Visualizer and Analyzer) integrated debugging environment. In addition to conventional logical debugging extended to parallel debugging, DIViA correctness debugger also facilitates visual and message debugging. The performance debugger of DIViA helps in detecting the communication bottlenecks and in quantifying performance in terms of both computation and communication to help the user fine-tune the parallel application. DIViA works with both PVM and MPI environments and debugs C or FORTRAN language parallel programs. In addition to the C-DAC developed PARUL parallel libraries, PARAM OpenFrame supports industry standard libraries such as ScaLAPACK. The graphics and visualization tools include support for XGL, Open GL, XIL and application visualization environments such as VIS 5D, KHOROS and IRIS Explorer.

The whole program development environment comes with PARAM VIEW as a user window to the system backed by a comprehensive tutorial in the form of PARAM TUTOR.