I had to laugh when I read this copy on their website: "Given the choice between a sharp stick in the eye and debugging multi-threaded code, many developers would think long and hard." TotalView, the company claims, is the non-harming alternative to thread-induced blindness: It makes debugging threaded C/C++ and Fortran code as easy as serial code by acquiring and grouping threads as they are created. You can set breakpoints at the thread level, or analyze mutexes, queues and sections of your code, among many other features. It also tackles Open MP- and MPI-related tangles with a Message Queue Graph that makes "it easy to see where interprocess communication has gone wrong."

Though the tools are clearly aimed at the HPC market, it will be interesting to see if they begin to have more traction among enterprise and consumer software developers as making multi-core performance improvements becomes more urgent.