Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Tuesday October 16, 2007

SunStudio Vodcasts in past quarter
Some very nice Video podcasts talking about SunStudio released on SDN Channel in the past 3 months or so that are worth watching. Heres a list (the descriptions are copied directly from SDN Channel
Sun Studio Adds Linux Support: Hear from Roman Shaposhnik as he discusses one of the biggest advances in Sun Studio 12 - Linux support. The new release includes a suite of compilers and tools for Linux so developers don’t need to use a different development tool for different platforms.
The New Face of Sun Studio Sun Studio 12 boasts a boatload of new features, but in particular the new graphical IDE really stands out. Sun Studio is now a great development tool for command-line programmers and those who have never worked outside a GUI. Hear from Sun staff engineer and project lead for Sun Studio IDE, Gordon Prieur, spotlights some of the most interesting aspects of the new IDE and talks about which types of developers stand to benefit the most.
Sun Compilers Pile On Performance Sun Studio 12 improves application performance whether you choose to measure it with an industry-standard benchmark or through real-world deployment. Sun Studio’s robust, mature, and reliable compilers provide the bulk of that boost, delivering up to a 30-40% performance improvement, according to Sun performance engineer Mike Burke.

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 16 2007, 01:00:06 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Wednesday October 10, 2007

Sun Releases Niagara 2 (UltraSPARC T2) with throughput record performance

Sun has introduced server and blade systems based on much-awaited Niagara2 chip (aka, N2, also officially called the UltraSPARC T2).
There were three new models announced:   Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 server module.
These contain upto 8 cores (available in 4-core and 6-core as well) and 8 threads/core, for upto 64 threads per chip (wasnt that like a full fledged datacenter machine, not a long time back?). N2 makes up for some deficiencies in the original Niagara design with the addition of FP unit per core and 1 Crypto unit per core.
Best of all, (IMO), the performance numbers on SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006  leave the competition in the dust!
Check out this performance reference from Sun's official announcement. It clearly makes this chip the king of computing capacity!
All of this is of course enabled by Sun Studio 12 compilers, which played a key role in making the World Records a reality.
Cool, isnt it? I think so...

Posted by tatkar ( Oct 10 2007, 11:20:09 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Thursday October 04, 2007

Sun is getting noticed in x86 market
This  interesting article in internet news points to a growing interest in Sun's x86 servers. I found it to be a good read overall, but two statements stuck in my mind, so I'm quoting them here:
"I was surprised as hell," Dan Olds, principal of GCG, told InternetNews.com. "The big thing it tells you is that real customers see plenty of differentiation in these boxes, even if the vendors are using the same chips, Ethernet cards and other components."
and finally, at the end, he notes:
"Looking ahead, and perhaps in a nod to the growing importance of virtualization and consolidation, more than half of survey respondents said they expected to purchase fewer, but larger, x86 systems in the future."
Bingo! Sun's sweet spot, I'd assume.
Posted by tatkar ( Oct 04 2007, 01:04:48 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Tuesday October 02, 2007

Sun Studio 12 ML is now available
Sun Studio 12 Multi-Language Release is now available in English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. The ML release has IDE enhancements(based on NetBeans 5.5.1.1) and contains bundled product patches!
Check out the downloads here.
Posted by tatkar ( Oct 02 2007, 10:54:55 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Monday October 01, 2007

New OpenMP book published
Its nice to see a new book on OpenMP published by some of the experts in this area.
See here for details.
One of the authors, Ruud van der Paas, works very closely with my compiler teams and with customers, so this book is sure to have practical and down to earth suggestions. I havent read it yet, myself.
PS. For those not quite in the know,here's a simple description of OpenMP:
OpenMP is a set of APIs for SMP programming in C, C++ and Fortran. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that influence run-time behavior.
Jointly defined by a group of major computer vendors, OpenMP is a portable, scalable model that gives programmers a simple and flexible interface for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from the desktop to the supercomputer. Posted by tatkar ( Oct 01 2007, 02:49:34 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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