Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Tuesday January 16, 2007

Good news! Sun is leader of OpenSource contributions!
The European Commission on FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) has released a new report on the Economic Impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness on the Information and Communication Technologies sector. One of their findings is interesting that  Sun contributes to and participates in more open source projects than any other commercial company, including IBM, Red Hat, Novell and HP. See this report for all details:  http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf
This doesnt even include the OpenSourcing of Java!
Other interesting tidbits gleaned from this:

• 62% of code is developed by individuals; about 19% by "industry" and another 12% by education institutions
• India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers; China is second
• The monetary value of voluntary contributions is about 800Million Euros per year; half of which comes from Europe
• FLOSS potentially saves the industry about 36% of R&D costs, which can be invested elsewhere
• US still leads in terms of large FLOSS-related businesses
• Only 3-4% of firms in Japan have adopted Linux; in Europe that number is around 35-40%
• The top FLOSS usage is in: Linux, OpenOffice, PostgreSQL/MySQL and Mozilla/FireFox
• UC (Berkeley), MIT and CMU are the leading educational institutions that contribute to FLOSS development
  
• Sun outranks #2 IBM,  #3 RedHat, #4 SGI. Sun outpaces IBM by over 3x in contribution; 5x over RedHat
• The most important reason developers participate in open source communities is to learn new skills for free

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Thursday January 11, 2007

Where is the Ada compiler on Solaris? (Answer follows)
We (the compiler group) often get asked this question:
What Ada Compiler does Sun recommend? Does Sun ship an Ada compiler as part of its compilers+tools set?

The answer to the second one  is: "No, Sun no longer ships an Ada compiler. The last one we shipped was in 1995. It is now EOLed".
The answer to the first one is a bit longer. Here goes:
The currently recommended Ada product is based  GNAT (GNU Ada Translator). It's available from GNU at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnat/gnat.html

Ada Core technology is the company that provide support, training etc...and they can be reached at:
http://www.adacore.com/home/
Ada Core is also a Sun Partner (you can find them here).
Sun currently has no plan to provide its own Ada Tools on Solaris. Both the Ada products (one free and one supported) mentioned above, work fine on Solaris and interoperate with Sun Studio.

Hope that clears it up!


Posted by tatkar ( Jan 11 2007, 08:33:46 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Wednesday January 10, 2007

Sun announces new Blade Servers with World Record Performance
Sun today announced the fastest and the industry's only 4 socket dual-core 2.8GHz AMD Opteron 8000 series processor based blade server (announcement is here).
And it packs an enormous performance punch! Here are the latest World Record Benchmarks for SPEC CPU2006 rate and SPEC OMP2001, using Sun Studio 11 and Solaris 10 with these blades:

• The blade server module posted an 8-thread SPECompM2001 score of 23224 on the medium size problem set. That score bested the latest competing 8 thread SPECompM2001 result of 19983, achieved by 4 cores/2 chips IBM System p5 550, by 16%.
• Beating the competition to the punch, the Sun Blade X8420 server module equipped with the fastest available Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors posted  record x86 throughput scores on both the SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006 suites (note: the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark, which supersedes the SPEC CPU2000 suite, provides a broader variety of workloads and better real-world applicability of the results and consists of two benchmark suites where one suite measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance and the other measures and compares floating point performance)  SPECint_rate2006 score of 93.1 and the SPECfp_rate2006 result of 87.3.

Required Disclosure Statements:

SPEC, SPEComp, SPECCfp and SPECfp Rate are Registered Trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Sun's results were submitted for review. For SPEC comparisons, socket equates to chip.
Competitive results from www.spec.org as of  Jan 05, 2007. Sun's results were submitted for review

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Thursday January 04, 2007

Congrats to Sun product teams among 2007 InfoWorld Award Winners!
InfoWorld announced their 2007 Technology of the Year Award winners Among the winners this year are these three Sun products

Sun Fire X4600 M2
Sun packed a whole lot of power into the Sun Fire X4600, which sports as many as eight AMD Opteron dual-core CPUs and 128GB of RAM. The plentiful processing and I/O resources make this server a tremendous platform for virtualization, HPC, and database applications. And the overall server design is impeccable.
Sun Fire X4200
The Sun Fire X4200 is a serious server in a seriously well-designed package. A frontrunner in both performance and management, it held its own in our file server and Web server tests, and Sun's remote control function is nicely implemented. We could picture ourselves building out an entire datacenter with X4200s.
Sun NetBeans 5.5
NetBeans already had the most complete collaboration features among IDE platforms. This year it added important new modules such as Matisse, the most advanced Java GUI designer available today, and complete support for Java EE 5. NetBeans is likely all that developers of enterprise Java applications will need.

Congratulations to the respective product teams. Its great to start off the new year with these great awards!


Posted by tatkar ( Jan 04 2007, 11:46:22 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Wednesday January 03, 2007

DST Alert with RogueWave Tools.h++ library on Solaris and SunStudio
Happy New Year, folks!
Roguewave Tools.h++ is shipped along with SunStudio compilers (this has been the case for several years now, perhaps over 15!). Even though the library itself is no longer shipped separately by RogueWave itself, Sun continues to carry an older version of Tools.h++ as part of its compatibility story.
Roguewave has posted an alert related to this library. It seems that the pending 2007 DST (Daylight Savings Time) rule changes that need to be reflected in this product, there may be some problems when/if our customers use the relevant DST routines. The DST changes were made official this year and will be in effect from March 2007 in the US. The alert is that the C++ product needs to be updated to reflect this.
Sun has issued a patch in response. Heres the summary of that response: If an application uses the Rogue Wave Tools.h++ library that comes with Sun C++, you need to get the C++ compiler patch. If the application uses the shared librwtools.so.2, deploy the new version of the shared library. If the application was linked with the static librtwools.a, you must re-link the application and deploy it.
If an application uses other 3rd-party libraries, consult the supplier of those libraries.
In all cases, you need the Solaris patches listed in the alert.

A full description of the alert and the comprehensive list of patches (for various platforms and various versions of Solaris) required is here.
It seems several folks have asked my (C++) group about this so I'm blogging about it to try to make this information more easily accessible (searchable).
Side Recommendation: Move onto Standard library interfaces and off of this library; the earlier, the better. Many of these interfaces precede the C++ ISO standards definition and the latter are clearly ... being standard... recommended

Posted by tatkar ( Jan 03 2007, 09:58:11 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

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