As part of the OpenSPARC initiative, a bunch of Cool Tools have been released. More and more Cool Tools are appearing, the first bunch appeared in Feb. 2006 and the most recent one was added yesterday. All very useful in helping to build an ecosystem around the OpenSPARC T1 and to help customers and users of the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 and other SPARC-based systems. The currently available tools are split into three groups. The first group are Cool Tools for Software Development and this includes the following:

• GCC for SPARC Systems
  C/C++ compiler that dramatically improves the performance of applications that are normally compiled with gcc on SPARC systems.
• ATS
  Automatic Tuning and Troubleshooting System (ATS) is a binary reoptimization and recompilation tool that can be used for tuning and troubleshooting applications.
• BIT
  Binary Improvement Tool (BIT) works directly with SPARC binaries to instrument, optimize, and analyze them for performance or code coverage.
• SPOT
  Simple performance optimizations tool (SPOT), produces a report on the performance of an application. The spot report contains detailed information about various common conditions that impact performance.
• Faban
  Faban is the consolidation of our benchmark development and management knowledge and experience. It is a facility for developing and running benchmarks. It has two major components, the Faban harness and the Faban driver framework.

The second group are Cool Tools for Deployment:

• Cool Stack
  CoolThreads Optimized Open Source Software Stack, (Cool Stack), is a collection of commonly used Open Source software optimized for the Sun Solaris OS (TM) / UltraSPARC (R) platform (using Sun Studio 11 compilers) for the best out-of-the-box performance. The Open Source apps included are: Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Squid and Tomcat.
• cooltst
  CoolThreads Selection Tool, (cooltst), applies simple heuristics to determine whether a workload from one platform is a reasonable candidate for Sun Fire T2000/T1000 servers.
• Consolidation Tool for Sun Fire Servers
  The Consolidation Tool for Sun Fire Servers V1.0, Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 Edition, is a software tool designed to simplify the task of consolidating multiple applications onto the Sun Fire T1000/T2000 platform using Solaris Containers.
• corestat
  Online monitoring of core utilization for Sun Fire T1000/T2000 servers. Core utilization is reported for all the available cores by aggregating the instructions executed by all the threads in that core. Its a perl script which forks cpustat command at run time and then aggregates the instruction count to derive the core utilization. An UltraSPARC T1 core can best execute one instruction/cycle and hence the maximum core utilization is directly proportional to the frequency of the processor.

And the final group Cool Tools For SPARC Architecture:

• SHADE
  SHADE is a fast SPARC instruction set simulator that is used to perform a variety of analysis functions on SPARC executables.
• RST
  RST is a trace format for SPARC instruction-level traces.

There are also several architecture tools included in the OpenSPARC T1 software download.

• SAM - SPARC Architecture Model
• Legion - Fast instruction accurate simulator
• SAS - Instruction accurate SPARC Architecture Simulator

Take a look at the above tools and stay in touch there are more to come.

[ T: OpenSPARC ]