Thursday August 14, 2008 Vijay Tatkar's Blog
All
|
Benchmarks
|
Business
|
Cloud Computing
|
General
|
Hardware
|
Linux/Unix
|
Performance
|
Software
|
Solaris
|
Sun
|
Sun Studio
Thursday August 14, 2008
Chalk Talk at Intel Developer Forum '08 SF
I'm giving a Chalk Talk at Intel Developer Forum
Fall '08 (San Francisco, Moscone Center, August 19-21), titled:
Multi-threaded
Development on OpenSolaris* and Linux* using Sun Studio*
The talk will focus on Sun Studio tools, including compilers that help
with MT applications, especially targetted towards multi-core chips. It
will focus on four aspects that are basic to Sun Studio's value
proposition:
- Performance
- Productivity
- Parallelism (particularly, MT)
- Platforms (OpenSolaris and Linux)
My session is on Tuesday, August 19th at 9:45AM. Hope you can join me there!
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 14 2008, 09:46:44 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
digg it
slashdot it
Technorati it
Wednesday August 13, 2008
Whats New for Compilers in Sun Studio Express 7/08
After discussing Whats
New in IDE, D-light and DTrace GUI and Documentation
for Sun
Studio Express 7/08, I'd like to cover compilers.
- Performance, Performance, Performance: This is of course, the #1 focus for any Sun Studio release. In this release, we have rolled in changes that were made in Sun Studio 12 patches on SPARC. Sun's BMSeer blog has already noted the benchmark numbers on the recently released Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 machines, in which Sun Studio has played a critical role. Among these:
- World
Record SPECompL2001 numbers on Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000
- World Record 2+ TeraFLOP Linpack HPC benchmark performance on Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000
- World Record SPECfp2006 numbers on Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000
- Improved Performance on x86. Previously, Sun Studio had trailed Intel Compilers (ICC) on the newer Penryn platform, while being very competitive (or better) on Woodcrest. One notable gap was the auto-parallelization in the SPEC program, libquantum. We've improved this immensely and are seeing very impressive scaling on this benchmark. Other improvements include instruction selection, improved auto-parallelization overall and improved micro-vectorization, among many others.
- Support for new architectures, including AMD's Barcelona, Intel's
Penryn and Nehalem and new quad-core SPARC64-based
SPARC Enterprise servers.
- Support for SSSE3, SSE4a, SSE4.1, SSE4.2 instruction sets both in assembler/disassembler (and dbx) as well as compiler intrinsics
- -xarch, -xtarget, -xchip, -xcache support
- Sun Performance library support for new architectures
- x86 assembler has been extended to understand GNU assembler
syntax,
- Context sensitive mnemonics without suffix. For example, mov $10, mem the Sun Studio Assembler defaults to movl $10, mem
- GNU Assembler compatible instruction synonyms have been added:
cbw==cwtd, cwd==cwtd, cwde==cwtl, cdq==cltd, cdqe==cltq, cqo==cqto,
movzb==movzbl, sysret==sysretl - GNU Assembler compatible assembler directives have been added: .p2align,.extern,.global,.
- x86 assembler can assemble 32bit memory addresses in -m64 mode
- OpenMP 3.0 APIs implemented. This wiki describes the features and implementation in greater detail.
- Interval arithmetic support for C++ on x86 (-xia option)
- C++ now inlines code with -g and any optimization option
- The pragma #pragma must_have_frame(list-of-function-names) is now supported.
- Additional support for GCC source compatibility, including
- __FUNCTION__ is a predefined identifier that contains the name of the lexically-enclosing function
- A case label in a switch statement can have a case range now
- The second operand in a conditional expression can be omitted.eg
- x ? : y is now equivalent to x? x: y except that x is not reevaluated
- Additional _attribute_ values are supported, eg:
- _attribute_((const))
- _attribute_((constructor))
- _attribute_((destructor))
- Fortran 2003 IMPORT statement is now implemented.
Disclosure Statement:
SPEC, SPECfp, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 07/14/08. Sun results submitted to SPEC.
Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (256 cores, 64 chips, 192/256 OMP threads, 2.52GHz) 1456653 SPECompM2001, 1250890 SPECompMbase2001.
Linpack HPC, results from http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/index.html as of 07/01/08. Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (SPARC64 VII @2.52, 64 chips,256 cores), 2.023 TFLOPS.
Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server(SPARC64 VII 2.5GHz) 28.8 SPECfp2006, 25.8 SPECfp_base2006.
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 13 2008, 03:18:02 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday August 08, 2008
New Places to look for Sun Studio Documentation
Sun Studio Documentation is now accessible
in a new location: the Sun
Microsystems Documentation Center. Click on Sun Studio which takes
you to the Sun
Studio Documentation Center: this is the center for having
technical papers, reference material, documentation, screenshots,
tutorials, demo videos, etc.
Here you will find three tabs:
- Topics: Information here is organized by topics familiar to the typical application development tasks. Topic areas include: compiling, debugging, performance tuning, high performance computing, performance profiling, multicore/MT/parallel programming, numerics, etc
- Technical Articles: This is a collection of in-depth technical articles
- References: Links to the complete documentation set for the current release of Sun Studio compilers and tools, as well as previous releases. It also includes user guides, reference manuals, man pages, and readmes, installation and getting started guides, and a Whats New doc
The documentation folks are also starting a new experiment by including details about a release for all the components (compilers, debugger, IDE, analyzer, etc..) on a new, but more comprehensive and upto-date Sun Studio Express Wiki site.
Besides these two new locations, the standard places of reference continue to be the docs.sun.com information center site featuring Sun Studio Collectionand the Sun Developer Network site for Sun Studio.
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 08 2008, 10:56:12 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Wednesday August 06, 2008
New DTrace GUI + Chime Plugin article on NetBeans site
The ink had barely dried on my
previous posting which included a reference to DTrace GUI features that are
new in Sun
Studio Express 7/08 , when Nasser Nouri, who created the DTrace GUI
plugin in NetBeans, brought to my attention this
newly published article on it at the NetBeans site.
The article describes how the DTrace GUI works, how to use D Scripts
packaged in the DTrace
Toolkit, how to download, install and run the Plugin.
A new feature added to the Plugin that gives it additional appeal is
the inclusion of Chime, a
graphical tool for visualizing DTrace
aggregations. Users like it for its ability to display data as it is
streaming in, but an interesting feature is the way it can be
extended for new displays(yes, the article has a section on Adding New Chime Displays as well!).
There are also some nice screenshots there. You can download the DTrace GUI
from the NetBeans Update Center.
Good work, Nasser!
Posted by tatkar
( Aug 06 2008, 11:43:52 PM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [1]
Friday August 01, 2008
IDE, D-light and DTrace GUI Features in Sun Studio Express 7/08
This blog entry focusses on some new functionality in the latest
Sun Studio Express 7/08. There is more to follow; here, I'd like to focus on three aspects of this Express.
IDE
The IDE in this Sun Studio Express release is based on NetBeans IDE
6.1, and includes the following new features:
- The Include-Hierarchy window lets you inspect the hierarchy of source and header files
- The Type-Hierarchy window lets you inspect all supertypes and subtypes of a class
- A new toolbar button lets you toggle between corresponding source and header files
- Code completion now works for #include directives
- A new Go to Type menu item lets you find a type (class, struct, enum, or typedef) by its name or prefix
- A new Go to Include menu item lets you go directly to a file that is included in a source or header file
- A new Go to Function or Variable menu item lets you find a function or variable by its name or prefix
- Project dependencies can be created for projects from existing code
- A choice of formatting styles for your source code
- A new Threads window shows you all the threads in the current debugging session
- A new Disassembler window displays the assembly instructions for the current source file
- A new Usages window shows you everywhere a class (structure), function, variable, macro, or file is used in your project's source code
The following changes have been made to the options of the sunstudio command:
- The --enablejava and --disablejava options have been removed. You can now use the Plugin Manager (Tools > Plugins) to enable and disable the Java plugins.
- The format of the --ui-classpath path option, which appends the specified path to the IDE's classpath, has changed to --cp:apath.
D-Light Tool
The objective of the D-Light tool is to make sophisticated application and system profiling, more accessible for casual users. There are many tools that profile applications and there are other tool that profile the system stack, but there are few tools that can join these views into an easy to use interface. For the first time, you can optimize your application and system environment by visualizing performance bottlenecks and resource contention up and down the application system stack.
Using an intuitive drag and drop interface, the D-Light tool provides an extensible library of instruments that represent the latest advances of profiling technology, including Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace). With instruments like CPU accountant and Sampler, developers can use the interactive GUI to quickly profile and peer into the runtime behavior of their applications.
For more information on using the D-Light tool, refer to the Project D-Light Tutorial .
The D-Light Tool now premieres on Linux platforms with two instruments, including a Clock Profiler. Its just the start of a more meaningful offering on Linux (and a nod to building instruments other than those based on DTrace.
DTrace GUI Plug-in
The NetBeans DTrace GUI plug-in is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for running DTrace scripts, even those that are embedded in shell scripts. In fact, the DTrace GUI plug-in runs all of the scripts that are packaged in the DTraceToolkit. The DTraceToolkit is a collection of useful documented scripts developed by the OpenSolaris DTrace community.
In its own manner, DTrace GUI Plug-in has proved to be a popular tool in the NetBeans inventory, with many thousands (indeed 10's of thousands) of downloads.
For documentation for the 0.2 version of the plugin that is included in this Express release, see http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/ide/NetBeans_DTrace_GUI_Plugin.html
The 0.4 version of the plugin, which includes the Chime graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations, is now available for download from the NetBeans Plugin Portal. To download and install this version, choose Tools->Plugins in the Sun Studio IDE, and select DTrace from the Available Plugins list.
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 01 2008, 09:48:50 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday July 31, 2008
Using Sun Studio Express 7/08 on OpenSolaris 2008.05
A note to add if you are using OpenSolaris and
want to use Sun
Studio Express 7/08 with it:
OpenSolaris 2008.05
has a mechanism that lets you point it to the latest repository. The
facility is usually:
# pkg
set-authority opensolaris.org
If you use it to update packages to the latest builds, there is a
chance that you might run into a mismatch between various packages that
might cause dbx to not work. The problem manifests itself while
debugging 32bit MT applications with messages like:
dbx:
warning: could not initialize thread debugging library -- debugger
service failed
dbx: warning:
thread related commands will not be available
Or a message such as:
ld.so.1:
ld: fatal: libld.so.4: version `SUNWprivate_4.2' not found
This
is usually due to a mismatch between ld and liblddbg.so in packages
such as SUNWtoo and SUNWcsr
If you run into this problem, or better still to avoid this problem,
the advice is to stay
on the OpenSolaris 2008.05 version and not upgrade to the latest builds.
Alternately, at least at this stage, updating the entire system also
works (since everything stays in sync), but there is no guarantee that
this will continue to always be the case, so its best to avoid doing
this upgrade.
Posted by tatkar
( Jul 31 2008, 08:14:10 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [2]
Wednesday July 30, 2008
Sun Studio Express 7/08 is now available on Solaris and Linux
Sun
Studio Express 7/08 is now available for Solaris 10,
OpenSolaris and Linux (RHEL and SuSE). We are looking for you to
preview the new features and give us feedback. Listening to this
feedback is a prime motivation for exposing these features, so
please be sure to sign in and use the Sun Studio Forums to give us your
comments, suggestions, (gripes?), etc
The new release is loaded with features. Some of the big bullets are:
- C, C++ compiler, assembler features:
- Support for SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 features
- Instruction selection and performance enhancements for AMD's Barcelona and Intel's Penryn and upcoming Nehalem chips
- Optimization enhancements for SPARC64 VI, VII, UltraSPARC IV+
and Niagara-2 chips (aka UltraSPARC T2), bringing several World Record
Benchmarks on these new machines
- OpenMP3.0 API support in C, C++, Fortran compilers
- MPI Profiler
- Performance analyzer enhancements
- D-light is a plugin for the Sun Studio 12 IDE that offers a variety of instrumentation that takes advantage of the Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) debugging and performance analysis functionality in the Solaris OS.
- DTrace GUI Plugin is a graphical user interface (GUI) for running DTrace scripts
- NB6.1 based Sun Studio IDE
- RTC on Linux for memory access, leaks and usage
- Sun Performance Library improvements, geared towards new (micro-)architectures
For more detail on these features, see the Express Details wiki pages. I will also highlight features in each of these topics in subsequent blogs.
Additional note:
Several others have blogged about it as well. Heres a few that you might want to visit to get other aspects of this release:
On the Record: http://blogs.sun.com/ontherecord/entry/sun_studio_express_07_08
Richard Friedman :http://blogs.sun.com/rchrd
OpenMP: http://openmp.org/
HPC at Sun: http://hpc.sun.com/
Yuan Lin here: http://blogs.sun.com/yuanlin
Josh Simons: http://blogs.sun.com/simons/category/HPC
Kuldip Oberoi here: http://koberoi.com/
Posted by tatkar ( Jul 30 2008, 11:11:33 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday July 22, 2008
Clarifying Sun Studio Patch Policy: Patches continue to be free
Many of our users apparently do not download the latest Sun Studio patches because they do not know
about a SunSolve policy change over the past years. Please note that Sun Studio
patches continue to be free; the only change is that
users need to get a sunsolve online account (which is free) in order to download it.
To drive this point home, our support team has added the following text
to all of our patch downloading pages
:
Sunsolve is a proprietary online database of software patches, patch
information, tools, technical articles and troubleshooting documents.
Access to SunSolve requires you to have a Sun Online Account and
accept the updated License Agreement. Getting new account at sunsolve
is free and does not require a service contract at https://reg.sun.com/register?program=ssu&goto=http://sunsolve.sun.com.
If you have an existing SunSolve Sun Online Account, and you have not
already accepted the new Software License Agreement, the next time you
login and access SunSolve Online, you will be prompted to accept the
new Software License Agreement. This is stored on a cookie on your
system. If you clear the cookie you will be asked to re-accept this
license agreement.
All the pages are now live with this updated wording clarifying the
policy:
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/ss12_patches.jsp
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/ss11_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/ss10_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/ss9_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/ss8_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/s1s8cc_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/s1s7ee_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/s1s7cc_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/fd6u2_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/fd6u1_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/fd6_patches.html
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/patches/sw5_patches.html
Posted by tatkar
( Jul 22 2008, 04:07:41 PM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [2]
Monday July 21, 2008
New Sun Studio Article: Accelerate Builds with Dmake
Sun Studio's dmake utility
can accelerate complex application builds by building components in
parallel. Learn how to configure a distributed build environment and
get guidelines on makefile customization. This
new article on the Sun
Studio Developer Portal explains this in easy steps.
As a point of reference, when we turned this loose on Solaris (in the
Solaris 9 timeframe), on a 4-CPU machine, it accelerated build
times by roughly 3.6x (reducing ON builds from approximately 12 hours
to a little over 3 hours). Those numbers: 12 hours down to 3-ish hours,
tell the real story of a direct benefit to developers and integrators,
not just to buildmasters or release engineers.
Dmake is also the default for builds in the project system that the Sun
Studio IDE uses, so you get this benefit without having to think about
it.
Posted by tatkar
( Jul 21 2008, 12:50:09 PM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [0]
Tuesday May 27, 2008
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 )
Permalink
Comments [2]
Tuesday May 13, 2008
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:
- the concept of tasks has been added to the execution model
- the memory model now covers the notion of atomicity of memory accesses.
- the definition of an active parallel region has changed
- changes in internal control variable (ICV)
- new routines added to the OMP runtime library, including: omp_get_level, omp_get_ancestor_thread_num, omp_get_team_size, omp_get_active_level
The OpenMP model (shared memory programming) is often debated vs the MPI (message passing interface) model (a distributed, cluster programming model), which is also a vendor-driven industry standard. Both are aspects of the parallel programming model, which aim at extracting parallelism from an existing application. OpenMP is an incremental model that works at the high-level language level, whereas MPI is a low-level and difficult to use. This section in the Wikipedia has an interesting set of Pros and Cons contrasted between OMP and MPI. The MPI model grew in popularity in the past decade because clusters became easier to buy and assemble and the increasing power of the x86 single-node servers ensured that such clusters could be built cheaply and still deliver good performance. However, now with the multi-core revolution upon us, there is fresh interest in making each of these "nodes" parallelizable as well and so there is fresh interest in OpenMP.
Of course, time will tell, which paradigm, or any derivative of these will ultimately see large-scale adoption. In the meantime vendors are busy working to ensure that they have good, high performing OpenMP implementations that can be used to exploit the increasing number of cores in a single node.
Sun, of course, has been in this game from Day 1. We've had compilers that have supported every OMP standard, immediately after it came out (and no later than any other vendor).
The same will be true with OMP3.0; we are working on getting an implementation of this out very soon now.
Posted by tatkar ( May 13 2008, 09:58:20 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday May 09, 2008
Sun/Intel Threading Building Blocks Videos now posted
Intel has now posted/hosted Sun/Intel Threading Building Blocks videos.
Here they are:
- Scott Smith of Intel speaks with Sun’s Deepankar Bairagi and Intel’s John McHugh about the announcement:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA6yLLFlN_U
- John McHugh sits down with Deepankar Bairagi to talk about the advantages of adding TBB to Sun Studio:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4pNNljPvLs
- Deepankar discusses the benefits of using TBB and shows how to access it from within Sun Studio.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWhHRlp2p2M
Posted by tatkar ( May 09 2008, 02:24:37 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday May 08, 2008
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:
- It requires fewer lines of code to achieve parallelism than other threading models.
- The applications you write are portable across platforms.
- Since the library is also inherently scalable, no code maintenance is required as more processor cores become available.
- This C++ runtime library abstracts the low-level threading
details necessary for optimal multi-core performance.
- It uses common C++ templates and coding style to eliminate
tedious threading implementation work.
Intel TBB was available for Linux and Windows from Intel's product website (here).
A version of TBB that can run on the Solaris platform (x86) is now being . This version of TBB can be built using the latest Sun Studio Express compilers and tools(download a copy from here).
The code changes required to make this work on Solaris using Sun Studio have been putback to the opensource site.
Downloading TBB:
You can download TBB (http://threadingbuildingblocks.org). Remember to choose the stable version of TBB.
Download both the source version and the Sun binaries available at the TBB download site.
Use gunzip to unzip the tbb source archive and then extract from the tar archive, using gtar. A directory named tbb20_010oss_src is created.
Similarly extract the sun binaries and place them adjacent to the src directory of the source distribution.
Building TBB for Solaris:
% cd tbb20_010_oss_src
% gmake
This builds the TBB library and places it in the build directory, for example,
tbb20_010oss_src/build/SunOS_ia32_suncc_cc5.9_kernel5.10_release.
This directory contains the files libtbb.so and libtbbmalloc.so.
The TBB build also generates two files, tbbvars.csh and tbbvars.sh. These two files contain useful settings of environment variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which are needed for building an example.
If you downloaded the sun binaries for TBB, the shared objects for the library will be available in the
directory tbb20_20080408oss_src/sun/ia32/cc3.4.3_kernel5.10/lib and the tbbvars.csh and tbbvars.sh scripts will
be in the directory tbb20_20080408oss_src/sun/ia32/cc3.4.3_kernel5.10/bin.
You will find more information on TBB at the Sun Studio Developer Tools Portal,, in particular check out this introductory article on TBB .
Heres raising a toast to the happy introduction of this collaborative effort! Congratulations, Intel!!
This could be the start of something new and wonderful together!
Posted by tatkar ( May 08 2008, 09:53:41 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday February 05, 2008
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:
- Improvements in the Classes window, which lets you see all the classes in your project and their members and fields.
- New Include hierarchy, which lets you inspect the hierarchy of source and header files in your project
- New Type hierarchy, which lets you inspect all types and subtypes of a class
- Code completion for #include directives
Dtrace Plugin Graphical User Interface (GUI) for running DTrace scripts that can be installed into the Sun Studio IDE or NetBeans IDE 5.5x, 6.0 http://www.netbeans.org/kb/dtracegui_plugin/NetBeans_DTrace_GUI_Plugin.html
Assembler Plugin as part of Netbeans C/C++ Developer Pack http://asm.netbeans.org/
- supports x86/SPARC assemblers provided by the compilers as well as disassemblers provided by debuggers
- syntax highlighting (instructions, labels, registers etc.)
- register usage highlighting (read/write with different colors)
- hyperlinks to jump and call targets
- navigator as in any other language
- register usage information (shown in a special Registers window)
- register live ranges indication
MPI: This allows application developers to access Netbeans platform to develop, test, debug MPI applications for the Sun Grid Compute Utility. [Not listed on the NetBeans Plugin portal] https://mpiplatform.dev.java.net/
TeamWare, ClearCase, VSS support to NetBeans, at: http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqVSSProfile
Posted by tatkar ( Feb 05 2008, 12:09:54 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday February 01, 2008
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:
- Tuning for dual-core and quad-core Core2 systems (with Woodcrest,
Clovertown targets) that was included in Sun Studio 12 ML release has
been integrated.
- I blogged about this earlier in this blog
- Tuning for upcoming Quad-core Barcelona systems. This too was in Sun Studio 12 ML and is now integrated in this as well. Since we havent shipped these systems yet, I cant provide any official performance numbers yet, but similar to Core2, the improvements on this new (micro)architecture are remarkable.
- Considerably improved asm_inlining facility for GNU compatible
constructs
- -xcrossfile=1 is now an alias for -xipo=1
- -xcrossfile=0 no longer has any effect
- -Y and -W options no longer accept "i" as argument
- [C only] __FUNCTION__ is predefined identifier for name of lexically enclosing function
- [C++ only] -xia [Interval arithmetic] is now supported on
Solaris/x86.
- [C++ only] The C++ compiler now inlines code when you specify -g
- [SPARC only] -xannotate[=yes|no]. Causes extra annotations in
binary
for later binary optimization (this phase is not available on x86)
x86/x64Assembler:
- SSSE3 assembly syntax support
- GNU assembler compatibility:
- For mnemonics without suffix, the presence of register operands determines the suffix implicitly
- Allow 16bit instructions to access 32-bit register operands
- Allow 32bit addresses under 64bit mode
- Added GNU assembler compatible instruction synonyms and assembler directives
- Read the README here for all details
- Improvements in the Classes window, which lets you see all the classes in your project and their members and fields.
- New Include hierarchy, which lets you inspect the hierarchy of source and header files in your project
- New Type hierarchy, which lets you inspect all types and subtypes of a class
- Code completion for #include directives
- Plugins available for
Dtrace GUI, Assembler display
and an experimental
C/C++ Call Grapher
Posted by tatkar ( Feb 01 2008, 01:27:36 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [6]
![[Vijay Tatkar]](http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/tatkar/vijay_crop.jpg)
