Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Second Life Chat was COOL!
We just hosted our first Sun Studio Chat on Second life yesterday and I was happy to be part of the experience. You can surf to the Sun Pavilion in Second Life by entering: secondlife://Sun Pavilion into the browser on the machine where Second Life is installed.

[For those of who dont know what it is: Second Life is an online virtual world, or a metaverse. It is one of many massively multiplayer online games;  it is open ended and has no overt fighting, missions, or goals. It has similarities to the worlds described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, or Vernor Vinge's True Names. It has been described as the broadband killer application. If you're looking for an introductory read on this matter, the wikipedia page on Second Life is excellent]

For me, this was a first experience on second life and I'm still learning how to make my way through this world. I have an avatar (vtatkar SunMicrosystems. A common convention for Sun Employee Avatars is the lastname: SunMicrosystems) who looks cooler than I do [but isnt that the idea ?wink, wink ;-) ] and our expert here helped give it the right, cool look. More important, tho, I was impressed to see that the 1-hour chat had about 12 guests in the audience and they asked questions that ranged from:

• If I'm using GCC, what do I get with Sun Studio? [Answer: Performance, focus on parallelism, integrated productivity tools like IDE, Performance Analyzer, Debugger, Thread Analyzer, etc and a common build environment fully supported by a world-class support organization. You can also use GCC with tools as they all recognize GCC-generated code and data(debugging, ..) ]
• Will it run on RH v5 [Answer: We are working on that now. Expect it in an upcoming Express release]
• Questions related to OpenSource applications, particularly as they pertained to Secondlife (which uses a lot of opensource software and is today partially opensource). [Answer to this was more expansive: Sun Studio compiles over 400+ Open Source applications; many apps that Secondlife works with are already compiled with Sun Studio and of course, we're happy  and eager to work with you to get those that arent in this list]
• How well do we support Intel? Recommendations for Linux vs. Solaris, esp. on Multithreaded programs? [Answer:  We partner with Intel and AMD and have regular- as in biweekly or so- contact. We are working with both very closely on performance and functionality issues with each microarchitecture and have announced World Records in SPEC for each vendor's chip. We are also working on making various of their applications available with both Sun Studio (Linux) and Solaris.

There were several queries related to the future of Secondlife and how Sun is interacting with this company and what are our future plans together, etc. Those are clearly out of my novice-Secondlifer realm, but the answers are mostly the obvious ones: we are indeed partnering with Second Life and expanding our relationship.

Overall, I was impressed with the passion and energy around the chat. The questions were fast, furious and positive. We (Kuldip Oberoi, our marketing manager- you can find his blog here- and I) took them as fast as we could. I see a real future around this new form of  participation. I'm hoping to do more of these and would welcome all of you to try out  Second Life and the Sun Pavilion.


Posted by tatkar ( Aug 31 2007, 01:29:21 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

SUNW ticker turns into JAVA
Sun Microsystems started trading under a new Ticker symbol JAVA. This has, of course, been a hot topic for the past few days since Sun announced it and Jonathan Schwartz, our CEO, blogged about it.
The engineers who have opined on it have generally been down on the move, reflecting much of blogdom (and the unusually high number of comments Jonathan's blog entry has attracted)... and thats putting it mildly . But time will tell if this move brought the awareness and openings that it was intended for. Ultimately, if it ranks alongside the The Network is the Computer slogan that helped identify SUNW's place, it would be a good measure of success.
Meanwhile, not all the sentiment out there is negative. Heres an independent view of this, from BusinessWeek this morning . Interesting and pretty neutral take.

PS. For those of you concerned that googling for SUNW just got harder, yes, it did. Just remember, the new string to search for is NASDAQ:JAVA . Neutrally speaking, the W in SUNW had gotten redundant lately and was turned into WorldWide from Workstation, anyway. Posted by tatkar ( Aug 27 2007, 09:00:07 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Sun Studio 12 patch performance improvements quantified for Core2Duo
My previous blog pointed at the first available Sun Studio patch. It mentioned that there were performance improvements for the Core2Duo architecture beyond what was in the released product.
This one quantifies the improvements we're seeing on SPECfp2000 (52%) and SPECfp2006 (34%). There are small improvements (0-3%) on SPECint2006  and 1-4% on SPECint2000 as well, but they are not as noteworthy. The system used here is a whitebox, 2 CPU, 4core 2.66GHz x5355 based system with 4GB memory. This run was a purely a comparative run and not done for a SPEC submission, so these arent official SPEC numbers (they are not numbers, anyway) but SPEC estimates, in that regard.

Benchmark: SPECfp 2000	%Change (over Studio12 FCS)
wupwise	30.3
swim	83.23
mgrid	39.10
applu	80.92
mesa	3.52
galgel	172.86
art	130.83
equake	14.05
facerec	2.44
ammp	65.74
lucas	13.86
fma3d	36.98
sixtrack	96.94
apsi	50.50
Overall Geo Mean	51.99

Benchmark: SPECfp 2006	%Change over Studio 12 FCS
410.bwaves	10.05
416.gamess	50.26
433.milc	12.99
434.zeusmp	50.34
435.gromacs	21.24
436.cactusADM	57.82
437.leslie3d	32.10
444.namd	62.20
447.dealII	9.00
450.soplex	4.58
453.povray	13.38
454.calculix	166.38
459.GemsFDTD	24.79
465.tonto	41.75
470.lbm	12.27
481.wrf	3.00
482.sphinx3	18.75
Overall Geo Mean	34.55

Now, you know, why I recommended that if you're using Sun Studio 12 for Woodcrest, Clovertown (Core2Duo) systems, then you MUST get the new patch.

Posted by tatkar ( Aug 21 2007, 01:49:23 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

SunStudio 12 patch released
The first set of patches is available for SunStudio 12 on SunSolve.
Among the things you are likely to find interesting in the patch are:

• Support for upcoming  quad-core Barcelona chip from AMD. Try -xtarget=barcelona to trigger these
  
• Improved support for Core2Duo architecture. These include
• Significant FP improvements specifically targetted to Woodcrest, Clovertown and Caneland based systems
• -xtarget=woodcrest, -xtarget=native and -fast support for appropriate -xarch, -xchip and -xcache values
  
• Several important bug fixes for issues filed during Early Access and Express program field testing that could not be addressed in the latter part of the SunStudio release cycle
  

Overall, its strongly recommended that you use the patch both for Solaris/x86 and Linux if you're working with Intel's Woodcrest, Clovertown or Caneland systems.
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 15 2007, 09:00:44 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Sun announces Niagara2 with nice Performance numbers
Sun today announced its latest UltraSPARC T2 processor. Sun is calling it the first "system on a chip", meaning it has a lot of features integrated into it that you would normally associated with a system, like computing, networking, security, and input/output. It will be available in a  single-socket rackmount or  blade server, and is targetted primarily towards TELCO, WiMAX and Network infrastructure deployments
From my perspective, it has some other really nice features that the previous generation Niagara didnt have:

• 1 FP unit per core, 8 FP units per chip
  
• 1 Crypto unit per core, 8 per chip with 10 dedicated functions supported in HW
  
• 8 threads / core (twice of Niagara), 64 threads /chip which gave it the highest SPEC OMP2001 numbers for a single chip
  
• Highest SPECintrate 2006 and SPECfprate 2006 numbers for a single chip easily outranking every other chip
  

How competitive are these numbers? Check out these two blogs from Sun's BMSeer describing this chip and its comparison with Intel/Clovertown, AMD/Opteron and IBM/Power chips: the first blog compares SPECint and SPECfp rates on a single chip, the second blog compares SPEComp numbers.
Its a nice chip, overall, overcoming many of the common deficiencies of the earlier, but still very popular Niagara chip. I hope Sun does very well with it; it does have a lot of potential.
Of course, all reported numbers were generated with Sun Studio 12 compilers.
Required Disclosure:
All SPEC CPU metrics quoted are from full "reportable" runs, but are designated as "estimates" because they used pre-production systems. SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 8/6/07.
Sun Ultra SPARC T2 @1.4GHz (64 threads, 8 cores 1 chip) 78.3 est. SPECint_rate2006, 62.3 est. SPECfp_rate2006.
Posted by tatkar ( Aug 07 2007, 02:06:59 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]