The Eclipse Foundation and Los Alamos National Laboratory on Tuesday are formally announcing the Parallel Tools Platform Project to furnish better open source software tools for parallel computers.

The Eclipse-based project is intended to provide a portable parallel development environment that can boost productivity at the engineering level.

"What we"re trying to do is address a deficiency in development tools for parallel application developers," said Greg Watson, project leader in the Los Alamos Advanced Computing Laboratory. Los Alamos hopes to provide deliverables based on the project by September; commercial vendors can base products on the technology, according to Watson.

Citing the industry movement toward commodity-based systems such as clustered computers, Eclipse and Los Alamos said developers must deal with a greater complexity of systems and disparate tools. In the fragmented parallel tools market, developers currently cope with a profusion of interfaces ranging from command line tools and text editors to graphical user interfaces. Developers must change tools every time they move to a new parallel machine, IBM and Los Alamos said. There is little integration between the tools, the organizations added.

The Parallel Tools Platform Project will support a wide range of parallel architectures and feature an integrated debugger and infrastructure to integrate other parallel tools. A separate, related component will add Fortran support to the Eclipse IDE.

A goal of the effort is to transform current practice into best practice for parallel application development while enabling software vendors to bring proprietary tools into the larger open source computing environment.

The project was discussed at the EclipseCon 2005 conference in Burlingame, Calif. in March.

Anyone interested in becoming involved in the project can access information at Eclipse.