We had quite a number of people visiting the Sun booth today, the first full day of the Supercomputing 2006 exhibition in Tampa. We gave out a lot of DVDs with Sun Studio 11 and Sun Studio Express. Lots of interest in seeing the compilers on Linux, which will be a major feature of the next release, which we're calling Sun Studio 11.next, and it is available as a technology preview in Sun Studio Express.

Already users of Sun Studio Express on Linux are reporting great performance results, even outperforming gcc and other compilers. But getting the word out that Sun Studio is a free download is the hard part. It seems to take forever for this to take hold. Same is true for Solaris.

Having the compilers on x64/Linux, with the same features as on SPARC/Solaris brings with it a new community of users who probably haven't worked with Sun before. This should be interesting for both parties.

I did get a chance to walk around the university and national labs exhibits. Lots of real science and engineering being done with clusters of systems, from the modest to the extreme. But my feet hurt too much from standing in the booth for some hours to spend much time. I'll try again tomorrow.

And talking about clusters, one of the "pods" in the Sun Booth was demonstrating Sun's ClusterTools 7, which is in 'early access' right now. It features an implementation of OpenMPI.

Here's a pic of our Sun Studio Performance Analyzer developers, Yukon Maruyama at our "pod". Yukon, along with other Sun Studio developers are at the exhibition giving demos and talking to visitors.

By the way, Josh Simon's blog has a good summary of some of the presos at the HPC Consortium held over the weekend.