Case Study: CGG slashes development time with Allinea DDTSnapshot Client: CGG – one of the largest integrated geosciences companies - providing leading geological, geo-physical and reservoir capabilities to the global oil and gas industry.

Situation: High-quality and on-schedule releases are the globally distributed software team’s mission – and resolving bugs quickly is critical to success.

Solution: Allinea DDT, the debugger for multi-threaded and parallel code.

Success: “Allinea DDT can cut the time-to-resolution by a factor of five,” says Daniel Trad, an experienced researcher.

Summary quotes: “The first time I used it was to debug an MPI code and I found it was the only tool that could solve the problem.” – Daniel Trad, an experienced researcher

“What I like about the tool is it’s easy to just pick up. I don’t have to keep digging into a manual or attend lengthy training courses.” – Neil Catling, Chief Software Scientist

Software developed by teams distributed across four continents holds many secrets of the success of CGG, the leading multinational geosciences company. Significant R&D is constantly integrated into its software and is critical to maintaining an advantage in a competitive industry.

Delivering that innovation in software to plan is a complex task – but CGG’s developers are using a powerful tool from Allinea Software that helps them to deliver by reducing the cost and impact of software bugs during that task.

Saving Time in a Complex EnvironmentIn the Calgary office, developer and experienced researcher Daniel Trad is currently working on three projects – all involving the need to define a single processing kernel and put it inside an optimization algorithm. The optimizations are big and the kernels are complex.

In 2006, the international Society of Exploration Geophysicists gave CGG a Distinguished Achievement Award. More recently, Trad was

awarded the inaugural Technical Achievement award by the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists.

Trad estimates that Allinea DDT can save him up to five times the amount of time he’d spend fixing problems without a debugger.

In the wider software development industry, surveys frequently estimate debugging to represent 50% of software development time, so those time savings using Allinea DDT can have a major impact on what the team can deliver.

Of his current projects he says, “With this procedure, each iteration is quite complicated. Add the fact I’m working with MPI parallel and multi-threaded software, and it becomes very sensitive – a robust and easy-to-use debugger like Allinea DDT is critical to success.”

“We tend to create small codes for definite tasks, rather than one long code with everything self-contained. This is the best way of programming but at the same time it makes it hard to follow the flow and becomes even more complicated when there are templates in C++ and other languages,” he says.

“Allinea DDT shows me the context of how modules are being used and helps me understand the flow.

Up to five times faster to fix bugs says award-winning developer at leading commercial geosciences company

Neil Catling Chief Software Scientist

Daniel Trad Research Advisor

Case Study: CGG slashes development time with Allinea DDT

It saves a lot of time compared to putting in a lot of printfs.”

Trad says he has tried other debuggers, but Allinea DDT best fit his requirements.

“Allinea DDT is packed full of features that are well-organized – making it intuitive to use,” he says. “In fact, the first time I used it was to debug MPI and I found it was the only tool I could use to solve the problem.”

He also uses it to run a check before he finishes a code project.

“Allinea DDT even shows me the variables I haven’t been using so I can go in and clean them up. So, I like using it as an intermediate check to make sure everything is in order.”

Investment in R&D – and peopleCGG invests at least 5 per cent of its turnover into R&D. Its ethos is to provide an environment conducive for excellent scientists to create innovative solutions to difficult problems. Given that serious commitment, it’s only natural it’s expanding its use of Allinea Software’s tools in its centers worldwide – after a long success with users in the UK and France.

Over in the UK at the Crawley office, Chief Software Scientist Neil Catling has been working in software development for more than 40 years and finds the tool a pleasure to work with. “With Allinea DDT, debugging is fast and enjoyable.”

Catling added, “What I like about the tool is it’s easy to just pick up. I don’t have to keep digging into a manual or attend lengthy training courses. I always recommend people use Allinea DDT – in fact, I was just showing it to a new developer today.”

Catling says Allinea DDT’s interface is laid out so well it makes debugging MPI and multi-threaded programs simple.

He’s not the only one at CGG who feels this way – his team have found Allinea DDT easy to use and said it’s outstanding for debugging MPI and multi-threaded programs.

He remembers when they first adopted Allinea DDT at the UK office – and he has seen Allinea Software continue to add time

saving innovations to the product – such as static analysis and version control feedback that are both useful for pointing developers to the source of problems.

Great product, great supportAll in all, Catling says Allinea DDT makes programmers more productive because it pays attention to creating an intuitive and pleasant debugging environment.

And this doesn’t only apply to the software. Catling says he’s been impressed by Allinea Software’s support team.

“I had a question a couple of months ago, when I was trying to figure out how to do something that Allinea DDT didn’t seem to be designed to do. I contacted the company through their website. They got back to me very quickly with a way to do what I wanted to do. I was impressed.”

Allinea Software Inc.2033 Gateway Pl Ste. 500, San Jose, CA. 95110 USATel: +1 (408) 884 0282

For more information about the Allinea environment, visit www.allinea.com

Allinea Software Ltd.The Innovation Centre, Warwick Technology Park, Gallows Hill, Warwick CV34 6UW UKTel: +44 (0)1926 623 231 Fax: +44 (0)1926 623 232

Image courtesy of CGG Image courtesy of CGG