ARM extends HPC offering with acquisition of Allinea Software (opens in new tab)

I'm guessing Allinea makes sense as they're also in the UK. It might be an acquihire thing, instead of specific tooling. The Manchester location took a while to set up, it's still growing and still looking for people, meanwhile I think they're moving to new offices. Talent can be a bit limited in the UK, especially outside of London (and after Brexit).

TL;DR: good chance of acquihire

One of the less obvious benefits of joining ARM is having extra sites to recruit developers at. Adding Manchester and potentially Cambridge to the existing two sites is cool.

More to the point, can someone tell me why I should use the profiler rather than the free/gratis tools, like TAU? Their salesman couldn't.

While a full parallel debugger is clearly useful in difficult cases, easily the most useful debugging tool is stack traces, perhaps from openmpi's automatic backtrace or LLNL's STAT. I don't know whether Totalview (proprietary alternative to DDT) was ever seriously used when we had it available to a multi-site project.

From what I recall of prices, if you're going to buy the tools for more cores than on the sort of single node we have, you're talking something like my salary. Then, in practice most university users won't measure or debug anyway, and may not accept deadlock as a concept when systems people do.

Also compare word count.