Monday June 30, 2008
Sun Studio preso at annual OSDevCon
The annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference (OSDevCon) was held
this year in the heart of the Czech republic- Prague, between June 25 -
27th (2008). The first day of tutorials included a free Tutorial by
our own Roman Shaposhnick on "OpenSolaris- an Ultimate Development Platform
?" Roman talked about Sun Studio of course and how Sun Studio and
OpenSolaris collaborate to form a stable development platform. Heres a
video of his tutorial/presentation( a complete 1hr+ preso)
Roman had two guest presenters: Adrian De Groot of KDE and Dennis
Chernaivanov from Docarema. KDE uses Sun Studio for development and is
very happy with the state of the tool (I
had blogged about it earlier here). Docarema uses both Linux and
Solaris servers as their backend
Dave
Stewart, our Intel partner guy, was also there and in this blog
comments on his take on Roman's presentation here. Dave provides an
interesting summary of events related to Roman's tutorial and the views
of the KDE and t-Bricks developers on the strengths and concerns
about using Sun Studio for development.
Seems like it was a successful conference all around!
Posted by tatkar
( Jun 30 2008, 01:30:08 PM PDT )
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Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.0 EA2 now available (now on Linux too)
Sun
HPC ClusterTools 8 Early Access 2 is a pre-release version of OpenMPI 1.3 with the latest bug
fixes and some new features.
CT8 EA2 is the first release to support Linux.
New features in CT8 include:
Sun Studio FAQ: Runtime Libraries/object licenses
Q: What are the concerns/license
restrictions around Sun Studio Runtime libraries, modules, etc. I
remember that in previous releases, we were allowed to use libraries in
3rd party code; now that its free, are we still allowed to do that?
Answer: Yes, this hasnt
changed. The list of objects/modules/libraries that users generally
require or request to have such permission for, has been modified
(mostly added to), over the years, but the license is essentially the
same.For more information and
details and a list of which objects are included in this, here this RunTime
Libraries Licensing Agreeement.
Hint: we try to
make this as convenient as possible for others to use our software. Our
SW at this stage is not fully and freely redistributable, but
>99% of it is. In particular, the IPS packages that are part of
OpenSolaris 2008.05 release (go to package manager and type in
sunstudioexpress in search) is now fully redistributable.
Posted by tatkar
( May 27 2008, 03:41:48 PM PDT )
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Sun Studio wins Infoworld award in Application Performance category
Sun Studio came out on top in the application performance category in the recently rated in a new
IDE survey by Infoworld (here).
NetBeans is rated lower than Sun Studio (on which the SunStudio IDE is based), which is a surprise. Also surprising is the absence of Eclipse in the list, which the article explains in a very unsatisfactory way, IMO.
I'm just glad that it is being noticed that we -Sun Studio compilers- produce good overall application performance. Someone saying ITS BEST really helps.
FYI, IBM's Rational IDE came up on top overall. I'm sure the survey is not without bias, as the comments it has attracted seem to indicate.
Posted by tatkar
( May 22 2008, 10:28:54 AM PDT )
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Sun unleashes Quad-core Barcelona systems
And not a day too soon, either!
To quote Sun's press (I dont think I'm capable of writing such long, flowery and yet wonderfully descriptive sentences! :-)
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the availability of its first Sun Fire and Sun Blade systems powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, bringing new capabilities, increased performance and expanded scalability to customers that purchase or upgrade to these quad-core systems. The Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240 and Sun Fire X4440 servers, the newest systems to join Sun's extensive x64 (x86, 64-bit) server line, give customers industry-leading energy efficiency, density and scalability powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and a choice of operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), OpenSolaris operating system, Linux, Windows and VMware.
And as a footnote, Sun Studio 12 (with patches) is fully optimized for it (use -xtarget=barcelona switch in addition to the usual switches, to get better instruction selection, esp. for FP-style code). So far, feedback on this mode of code generation has been very positive. I had described these changes in a much earlier blog (as blog timelines go!)
here with over 30% improvement on SPECfp and smaller changes on SPECint programs. The volume deployment on systems using Barcelona has been ...er long awaited. Its great to see AMD back in the game; I'm sure this will begin to take the quad-core performance battle with Intel to the next level.
Posted by tatkar
( May 13 2008, 10:28:26 AM PDT )
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OpenMP 3.0 APIs released
The final specifications for the new version of OpenMP (version 3.0)
have now been published and uploaded to the official OpenMP site (here)
The draft was open to review from October through January; the
completed version is now official.
What is OpenMP?
The OpenMP Application Program Interface (API) supports multi-platform
shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran. OpenMP is a
portable, scalable model with a simple and flexible interface for
developing parallel applications on platforms from the desktop to the
supercomputer. The core elements of OpenMP are the constructs for
thread creation,
work load distribution (work sharing), data environment management,
thread synchronization, user level runtime routines and environment
variables. These are expressed as directives in Fortran and as #pragmas
in C and C++
This is a multivendor, multiple platform vendor-driven industry
standard. Members include Sun, AMD, Intel, Cray, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC,
PGI and SGI as vendors (permanent members) and auxilliary members such
as ASC/LLNL, cOMPunity, EPCC, NASA, RWTH Aachen
University.
You can get more info on OpenMP
at this official site (here). You can also read a more detailed
description at this
Wikipedia site.
The first standard came out in October 1997; an update (v2.0) in 2000
(for Fortran) and 2002(for C, C++) and a combined languages
revision (v2.5) in 2005.
There is also a SPEC standard benchmark, called SPEC OMP, that represents
typical industry application/usage of OpenMP. Sun has dominated SPEC
submissions on the lower end of the scale (less 8,16 nodes).
Whats New in OpenMP3.0?
There are several new features in OMP 3.0. A short enumeration of these:
Try NetBeans 6.1
NetBeans 6.1 has been out for about 2 weeks now, tho I have been remiss
to mention it here.
NetBeans 6.1 is a minor-version update, but contains some significant
changes, esp for C/C++ users. Among them:
Sun/Intel Threading Building Blocks Videos now posted
Intel has now posted/hosted Sun/Intel Threading Building Blocks videos.
Here they are:
Intel Threading Building Block library now available on Solaris + Sun Studio
Sun and Intel are collaborating to bring Intel TBB (Threading Building Block) software to the Solaris platform using the Sun Studio compilers. Today's the official launch of this collaborative effort. There is a lot of demand in the field for Intel SW (currently available on Linux and Windows) to be ported to Solaris, and this port nicely fills in one of the interesting gaps. One of my engineers worked collaboratively with Intel to make this happen; the success of this venture will encourage us to collaborate on other things as well. I welcome whole-heartedly this innovative problem solving technique to the Solaris platform; particularly with Sun Studio compilers. Parallelism is a critical area in SW development in our bold new future (together I might venture to add, for Intel and Sun). Sun Studio attempts to provide various high performance solutions; Solaris is a wonderful base to build this on with its built-in Multi-Threading support (from day 1 of Solaris 1.0) and the MT-safe libraries that form the bedrock of a parallel programming base. Intel's TBB complements this solution space nicely by offering a unique approach to simplifying parallelism for a certain kind of C++ problem set.
What is Intel
Threading
Building Block?
Intel invented Threading Building Block (TBB) as a leading-edge,
open-source runtime library with a rich set of templates to
significantly lower the effort required to express parallelism in C++
programs. The opensource
site is here. Some of the benefits of Intel TBB are:
JVM now compiles with Sun Studio on Linux
Yep, you heard it right.
The OpenJDK team has pulled off yet another fantastic feat here:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/hotspot/rev/485d403e94e1.
Serguei Spitsyn integrated recently into this changeset.
So, should we get excited about
compiling OpenJDK/HotSpot? Doesnt Sun Studio on Linux already compile a
bunch of industrial scale applications?
Indeed we should. Some reasons why:
OpenSolaris launched and Sun Studio is in the network package repository OpenSolaris
is here! Its formal launch at CommunityOne
(the day prior to JavaOne in San Francisco) has attracted a lot of
attention. It was picked up by The
Register (here), Application
Developer Trends (here), etc. Comments have ranged from "Cool, this is new and exciting" to
"Looks just like Linux"
(including the site www.opensolaris.com).
An interesting bit of praise comes from this article in ZDnet, titled
What Ubuntu wants to be, when it grows up
OpenSolaris comes with full support, ranging from per incident support
to a full 24x7 plan, geared fully towards supporting (as they call it) "from dorm room to the corporate board
room".
OpenSolaris used to be called Project Indiana,
for those in the community more familiar with that name.
The new distribution includes a small core operating system on a
LiveCD, a network
package repository, application packages, and the Sun-developed Image
Packaging System (IPS) to hold it all together. With a small LiveCD,
you can quickly (with just 6 clicks) install a
desktop with a core set of utilities to assemble a simple desktop
including Firefox and Thunderbird. IPS lets users easily download and
install only the OpenSolaris
components they want, rather than a monolithic bundle. And IPS
also supports current Solaris packages, for backward compatibility. All the old stuff still works the same way.
You can add/customize your desktop or server with components you need,
as you need them through the network package repository. The classic
"packages" are all there in the repository:
ClusterTools 8 Early Access available
The ClusterTools 8 (CT8) Early Access 1 (EA1) release is now available at
http://www.sun.com/software/products/clustertools/early_access.xml
The CT8 EA1 software is a set of MPI libraries and tools for launching parallel MPI jobs on Solaris (SPARC and x86/x64). New in CT8 EA1 is MPI profiling support via VampirTrace and MPI PERUSE, Infiniband multi-rail communication, support for C++ applications built with STLport4 (in addition to the standard library libCstd, as well as other fixes and features contributed to Open MPI by the community.
CT8 EA1 is based on the upcoming Open MPI 1.3 release.
See http://www.open-mpi.org.
And yes, it works with Sun Studio 12, of course!
Posted by tatkar
( Mar 27 2008, 08:00:42 AM PDT )
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Russian Developer Web Portal launched
Sun's Russian team has launched Russian
developer web portal http://developers.sun.ru.
This is designed specifically to make Sun technologies closer to
Russian developers, teachers and students.
The portal is not just a translated replica of developers.sun.com.
Instead, it makes an introduction to the technologies in Russian to
make
them understandable for beginning developers, teachers and students.
Articles and other materials at the portal sometimes refer to English
materials at developers.sun.com or sun.com websites to give source for
deeper knowledges.
The portal contains translated articles and news as well as originally
written ones - all of them in Russian. There are 7 sections in the
Portal (Solaris, HPC, Java ME, JavaFX, NetBeans, Java EE,
For_Students).
Posted by tatkar
( Feb 12 2008, 03:46:08 PM PST )
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Interesting Plugins for NetBeans C/C++ Developers
NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack
is getting richer for C/C++ Developers every day. The base NB6.0 (and
NB6.1) is also improving constantly, most recently with features such
as:
New Sun Studio "refresh" in SXDE 1/08 release
SXDE 1/08 is out and contains a new Express release of Sun Studio
based
on sources more recent than version 12 release. There are a number of
improvements, features, components in this that were not in either Sun
Studio 12 or in previous
SXDE-bundled Sun Studio. Here is a list:
Performance improvements: