Wednesday November 11, 2009
Sun Studio OpenMP gets 12x improvement on Seismic benchmark on SLES10
This story is hard to pass up: Sun's
BestPerf blog (read the details here) recently reported how they
got a 12x performance improvement over a single-threaded version on an
important Seismic (Reverse Time Migration) benchmark using Sun Studio's OpenMP feature on
SLES10. Its a great story of how Sun can deliver performance through a
combination of Sun Studio and new Hardware (via Sun Storage F5100 Flash
Array). Yes, this is the same Flash Array
that has been the talk of the town and has
notched up several World Record wins.
Several points come to mind:
Sun Studio extends Linux support to OEL
Sun Studio now runs on Oracle Enterprise Linux. This extends the Linux platforms supported to include RHEL 5, SuSE 10, CentOS 5, and now OEL. Sun Studio continues to be available FREE on Linux as well as Solaris and OpenSolaris platforms.
You can download it from the
Sun Download center (here).
Posted by tatkar
( Nov 10 2009, 12:33:33 PM PST )
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Oracle and Cloud Computing: bluster v offerings
We all know and have read that Oracle and particularly Larry and the
Cloud Computing hype have been somewhat at odds. Some examples:
Cloud Computing peaks in Gartner Hype Cycle Study
Gartner's 2009
Hype Cycle is shown here. Some interesting trends among the 1600+
technologies they examined:
Cloud computing and Ebooks lead the pack among "Technologies at the
Peak of Inflated Expectations"
Social software and Microblogging (Twitter, ...) have tipped over and
are entering the trough of disillusionment
RFID and 3-D printing are on a track for being longer-term
transformational technologies
Gartner
Hype Cycle is explained here in greater detail.
If you dont want to buy the book, a simpler explanation is found in
Wikipedia here.
Posted by tatkar
( Oct 22 2009, 05:05:28 PM PDT )
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Showcasing Sun Studio Blogging Contest winners
In June 2009,
Sun Studio announced a blogging contest that ran until September.
The winners of that contest are now being showcased on the Sun Studio landing page.
The first winner to be showcased
here, on Sun Studio page,
and
here, at SDN Program News,
is
Sandeep Koranne, whose entry describes how Sun Studio 12 compilers are used to engineer a complex, innovative discrete geometry algorithmic application.
Sandeep is happy that he gets a 20% boost from Sun Studio compilers over GCC. But more than just performance, using Sun Studio 12 Compilers allowed him to "experiment with data-structures, perform automated performance tuning and overall presented a better environment for complex algorithmic coding, where the scientific researcher uses the programming environment to not only develop the code, but also to document and collaborate about the algorithm and methods used in the application" . The code is written in Standard C++, uses STL and written with portability in mind. Sandeep uses an IDE feature for Automated Task List generation innovatively to collect a list of "TODO" items. Neat!
Good work, Sandeep. And congratulations!
And congratulations to the other winners as well.
Posted by tatkar
( Oct 21 2009, 09:59:05 AM PDT )
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OOW, day2: Sun, Oracle performance showcase
It was heartening to see a lot of Sun Hardware at Oracle OW. For
years, I've tried to persuade Sun TechDays and other folks to showcase
Sun hardware at these developer shows, but its never really
materialized in any meaningful way. Sure, theres the odd server for
virtualization, etc at the shows, but that was mostly it.
By comparison, there was plenty of Sun HW here. I'm going to try and
list out some of the big, hunking boxes I saw in the Sun booth and
elsewhere. I'm sure my list isnt complete; I expect I will update this
blog to make it more so. For now, here goes, what I saw.
First impressions from Oracle OpenWorld
Yesterday was my first day at OOW. Even though there were some
scintillating events over the weekend, in particular these keynotes
from Sun's Scott McNealy & James Gosling(view here) and
Oracle's Larry Ellison (view
here), I wasnt at that portion of OOW.
My first impressions, even before I entered Moscone, was Wow! The place
was entirely taken over by Oracle. Buses ran billboards advertising
Oracle and the event, there was even a huge tent between Moscone North and South, reserved as dining area
and essentially closing Howard Street
(picture here). There was even the scale model BMW
Oracle Racing High-tech Catamaran on display at the Fourth and
Howard Streets intersection. Exhibitions were in Moscone South AND
Moscone West. Essentially, that 6 block area was nothing but Oracle OpenWorld.
My second impression was suits. Lots and lots of them. Essentially
different from IDF, which billed itself as the next, next, next big
thing, and JavaOne, which is clearly a hacker's conference (and where
James reminded Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz that he was out of place in
his suit at the keynote and got huge applause from the audience), this
one is a carefully and well-scripted conference. I could not listen to
the entire keynote
from Phillips and Catz (view here), but what I
could hear was very carefully laid out and executed. One astounding
fact I gathered (and later could relate to): Oracle has over 3000
products and the portfolio is growing ever faster!
So, I had booth duty on the exhibition floor. Moscone South.
Essentially a technology, but even more importantly, a services
showcase. All the major partners were there: HP, IBM, Dell, AMD, Intel
and of course Sun. And also, networking and wireless partners like
Cisco, Brocade, AT&T, Blackberry and Verizon. But also,
Infosys, CSC, NetApp, Deloitte, Wipro, EDS, Accenture, KPMG,
PriceWaterhouseCooper, Tata Consulting (TCS). I'm singling out that
last list because I havent seen them at any of the developer
conferences I usually go to (Sun TechDays, JavaOne, IDF, LinuxWorld,
etc). Oracle itself was fairly hidden (or backgrounded), giving their
partners essentially all the glory and topspots on the floor.
[Moscone West has a HUGE, HUGE Salesforce.com presence which I intend
to check out today].
There was a Cloud booth (for those of you who think Oracle is
anti-Cloud) and I engaged in some interesting and long discussions with
vendors in that booth (except Amazon, I'll corner them today, because
they are more of a known quantity as far as I'm concerned, so unlikely
that I'll learn anything new). On-Demand computing seems to have a big presence in what
Oracle calls "DemoGrounds"
(see this picture, eg).
The Sun booths were very strategic and visible. Right next to the main
entrance. We had some foot traffic, but for the Sun Studio booth,
mostly non-existent. I probably talked to about a dozen to 15 non-Sun
folks and some of them were even Oracle folks, who I knew by email
before. Given that the crowd was a suited, mostly business IT type
crowd, I am not surprised. A few that came by were disappointed that we
didnt run on Windows, but were suitably impressed by the offering and
demo when I showed them what we had.
An interesting day. Tiring, since the shift turned out to be a 5+ hour
shift without a lot of interesting traffic, but I think I learned a bit
from others there. Which makes it entirely worthwhile.
More details tomorrow, I hope.
Posted by tatkar
( Oct 13 2009, 10:58:37 AM PDT )
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New SunStudio Screencast on Improving Performance of Parallel Codes
Cool new video from Darryl just showed up on
Sun's HPC site.
In this video, Sun Studio expert,
Darryl Gove, shows how you can use Sun Studio Performance Analyzer to improve performance of a parallel application. Darryl uses the Mandelbrot set application to highlight the features. This screencast is also one of the demos we will run at Oracle OpenWorld that I mentioned in my
previous blog.
Take about 15 mins to view it. You will learn something about OpenMP, parallelization and even Mandelbrot sets.
Sun Studio will be present at Oracle OpenWorld 2009
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is coming up Oct 11-15 at Moscone Center, San
Francisco and Sun is a major sponsor this year. Sun will be
showcasing Solaris,
Java and Glassfish
(follow the links here for a list of session in each of these areas. Follow
this link for the complete set of sessions, along with
speakers, that Sun will be showcasing there).
Sun Studio will have a session on Porting
applications to Solaris and Maximizing Performance (the first part
is about the SourceJuicer
project in OpenSolaris and the second part is about Sun Studio Compilers and
Tools). There is also a demo station. This should be an
interesting experience, trying to understand what OOW attendees are
looking for .
For our part, we will be emphasizing Sun Studio's strengths and focus
areas:
What I saw at IDF09
After a short break, I'm back in blogland. In the meantime, I and my team
have moved back from Sun's Cloud Computing Engineering organization to
Sun Studio (Compilers and Tools). It was a wonderful ride and I learned
so many things that I intend to build on, in coming months. Of course,
my group is still involved in the same Cloud-related tools project of
making HW, SW stack and tools more easily accessible to developers who
dont have OpenSolaris (or Solaris) on their desktop and may not have
access to a SPARC machine in their development group. More on that in
the coming weeks, but right now I'll turn to Sun Studio related
activities.
This was the week for Intel
Developer Forum 09 (Sept 22-24, Moscone West, San Francisco).
Last year, the emphasis seemed to be on Nehalem, AVX, Graphics and
Parallelism.
This year, the emphasis seems to be around Mobility, some followup on
Parallelism and Cloud Computing. Intel is totally on top of the world
with the Nehalem chip: a well-balanced, high performance chip with a
great feature set that the company can build their entire roadmap on.
They are on a high, and know they have a winner in Nehalem.
This year again, we
were invited to have a booth and a Chalk Talk at the conference.
The booth duty was interesting and you really get to do some deep-dive
type conversations with some interesting folks who walk by and we got
our share, this year as well. Which makes it all worthwhile and
stimulating. Its an ideal time to listen to what other developers have
to say about our products (both good and bad and we heard both sides)
and to share views on where the environment is headed. If you remember,
I gave a Chalk Talk last year as well. This year's talk was
in our own booth, so it was more lightly attended but it was fun (and
chaotic) as well. My focus was on Compiler performance and the new
World Records we have created since the launch of Nehalem systems (get
details here: http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/software/index.jsp
and look for the Sun Studio logo), on new features (OpenMP 3.0, SSSE3,
SSE4.1, SSE4.2, ), new parallelization assistance tools (DBXtool, MPI
analyzer, Profiling D-trace like with D-light and DTrace GUI),
ease-of-development with a fully-integrated IDE (based on NetBeans 6.5
with considerably enhanced C/C++ support) and continuous ongoing
improvements (lots of improvements on the performance side, with better
vectorizer, register allocator, instruction scheduler, etc, an improved
Performance Analyzer and Thread Analyzer with support for new HW
counters and too many to describe here in details). Look up here for more details.
Intel itself build IDF as a showcase for next, next, next generation of
technologies. What was truly interesting was how much focus there was
on Cloud Computing. They had two dedicated 3-day track on this (one for
Public Cloud and another for Enterprise Cloud), but more than that, it
was interspersed at many of the other talks as well. The emphasis was
clearly on educating on technologies they provide to enhance
Datacenters:
How does Sun Studio stack up against GCC on Nehalem
This is one of the FAQs on the compiler front that I constantly get at TechDays, at customer meets, etc. I often point to various benchmarks that Sun Studio has won (and that a World Record means this compiler beats every other compiler in the business and that a system configured this way: with specified HW, OS and Compiler levels is the best in performance that you can currently get today.
I have devoted a few blogs to that effect as well in the past.
Two team members of the Sun Studio organization, John Henning (our SPEC rep, really) and Karsten have now written a paper comparing Sun Studio and GCC on Nehalem systems. Its a must read if you've struggled with this issue in the past.
You can find it here and you can post your comments or ask questions at the page as well.
Of course, as has been variously argued in the past (
see this thread , eg ), SPEC doesnt always give the full picture. However, IMO, its a good standby for what you can get out of a compiler. The suite is a broad set of industry-accepted applications that represent significant market segments in themselves. Tuning and extracting good performance isnt just a matter of turning some compiler switches on. You can get good gains by analyzing applications carefully and using compiler tunings to improve their performance effectiveness, which is generally what happens in the case of SPEC applications.
Posted by tatkar
( Jun 30 2009, 10:16:22 AM PDT )
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Three new important Sun Developer Tools update releases: Sun Studio, NetBeans and Clustertools
In the past week, Sun has announced availability of new releases and
updates to three of the most interesting Developer tools:
OpenSolaris Apps of Steel Challenge
Heres an interesting programming challenge for budding hackers
(just follow this link) .
OpenSolaris is looking to beef up its packages repository and you can help. Submit the best entry and win a laptop!
Have fun and make a difference in the OpenSolaris community, while you're doing it!
Takers, you may want to act fast, the contest lasts until May 8th.
And I should add: dont forget to use Sun Studio compilers to get that extra performance boost from
all the improvements made for all hardware upto the most recent one.
Posted by tatkar
( Apr 17 2009, 09:15:04 AM PDT )
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Dozen new World Records with Sun Studio + OpenSolaris at Nehalem Launch
Sun today
launched x64 systems based on Intel Nehalem chip (aka Xeon Processor
5500 series) in grand style! Sun is calling these Open Network
Systems to emphasize that its about much than just a chip upgrade
alone. In particular, the message is around system design and
innovation that encompasses " the convergence
of open compute, storage, networking and software to deliver best
application performance, simplicity and savings".
Application performance (and benchmarking performance) is best measured
by what Sun highlighted today. Closer to (my)home, its a hit out of
this park. Consider what the combination of Sun Studio 12 update 1
and OpenSolaris has cooked
up:
See you at Sun Tech Days Hyderabad 2009 in mid-Feb
I will be at
Sun TechDays in
Hyderabad, India
around Feb 18-20th. This is now the third year in a row for me. Its a wonderful place to present and have some hearty discussions. The crowd is typically very hungry for knowledge, the organizers are super-efficient and the planning is just immaculate. I go to several TechDays, typically, but this one has impressed me with the size, quality of organization and the impact we can make in recruiting interest in Sun.
Hope to see a lot more of this again this year. Frankly, it charges me up as well after spending 3 days there! Its refreshing to see what direction the future of Software industry (at least in India) is headed.
This is also a good time for me to catch up with whats changing in my country of birth, especially with the global recession underway.
Posted by tatkar
( Feb 05 2009, 10:26:39 PM PST )
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