Jennifer Foreshew | November 20, 2007
AUSTRALIAN software startup Guardsoft will supply debugging technology to a US Defence Department project to develop the world's most advanced supercomputer.
The Melbourne company will provide vital debugging technology to the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency project to develop the supercomputer by the end of the decade.
Guardsoft, spun out of research by Monash and Griffith universities, recently signed its first major licensing deal with US supercomputing company Cray.
Cray was awarded a $US250 million ($280 million) contract as part of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program last year.
The project, which aims to ensure the US has competitive supercomputers for military, intelligence gathering and industrial purposes, selected Cray and IBM to develop prototypes of the new technology.
Guardsoft's Guard debugging technology has been chosen by Cray to aid application developers in porting existing programs to its supercomputers.
Guard will be used in Cray's Cascade program.
The company is developing a revolutionary supercomputer based on its Adaptive Supercomputing vision aimed at integrating a range of processing systems into a single, scalable platform.
Guardsoft director David Abramson said the technology, which uses a technique called relative debugging, allows programmers to trace errors introduced into software as it is modified or ported from one system to another.
Unlike traditional debugging techniques, relative debugging compares the execution of a new program with a reference version that is known to work.
"We have licensed the product to Cray to modify and incorporate in its own products," Professor Abramson, from Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology, said.
The company was looking for further licensing deals, particularly in the US, he said.
"We are looking to license to other vendors and keep doing research in the area," Professor Abramson said.
Further work was needed on scaling up the technology for extremely large machines, as well as broadening the way it was delivered to the customer, he said.
Cray chief technology officer Steve Scott said the technology could substantially enhance programmer productivity, and complemented other tools under development.
Guardsoft's research has been funded from a variety of public and private sources, including the Australian Research Council.
It produces versions of the software for a range of platforms, including Linux, IBM's Eclipse platform and Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET.