# Parallel Debuggers: which do you choose?

**URL:** <https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/t/parallel-debuggers-which-do-you-choose/2949>\
**Category:** Discussion Zone\
**Tags:** programming-for-hpc\
**Created:** [September 22, 2023, 2:41pm UTC](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/t/parallel-debuggers-which-do-you-choose/2949 "2023-09-22T14:41:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nucci](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/f6c823/32.png) [@nucci](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/u/nucci)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 2023, 2:41pm UTC](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/t/parallel-debuggers-which-do-you-choose/2949/1 "2023-09-22T14:41:07Z")

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Greetings.

For many years we have offered our users a choice of parallel debuggers on our clusters. We’re looking to reduce the number of offerings to reduce system complexity, training requirements, financial costs, etc.

Which parallel debuggers do you use: DDT, TotalView, or others? Are there strengths or weaknesses of each? Or are there non-overlapping feature sets that make you want to keep several debuggers around?

Thanks.

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**Author:** ![lllowe](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/user_avatar/ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/lllowe/32/328_2.png) [@lllowe](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/u/lllowe)\
**Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 7:13pm UTC](https://ask.cyberinfrastructure.org/t/parallel-debuggers-which-do-you-choose/2949/2 "2023-10-11T19:13:51Z")

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Arm Forge, with DDT for debugger and MAP for profiler, is the best. Probably not the cheapest, but the best. Super easy to use, intuitive. Besides ease of use, I haven’t seen any profiler that can match MAP line by line profiling capability.

You asked for debugger though, not profiler. DDT was better than TotalView. Usually the large codes I work with are too slow to go through in any debug mode and I use ‘write’ statements or do visualization comparisons. But I could actually debug large codes successfully with DDT, and it was easy to set up the GUI to launch LSF on the HPC, and ‘easy to set up’ is saying a lot!

Sometimes ‘the best’ is just whatever you already know how to use…if someone on your staff is good at a certain debugger, maybe just pick that one.