Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Tuesday June 30, 2009

How does Sun Studio stack up against GCC on Nehalem
This is one of the FAQs on the compiler front that I constantly get at TechDays, at customer meets, etc. I often point to various benchmarks that Sun Studio has won (and that a World Record means this compiler beats every other compiler in the business and that a system configured this way: with specified HW, OS and Compiler levels is the best in performance that you can currently get today.
I have devoted a few blogs to that effect as well in the past.
Two team members of the Sun Studio organization, John Henning (our SPEC rep, really) and Karsten have now written a paper comparing Sun Studio and GCC on Nehalem systems. Its a must read if you've struggled with this issue in the past. You can find it here and you can post your comments or ask questions at the page as well.
Of course, as has been variously argued in the past ( see this thread , eg ), SPEC doesnt always give the full picture. However, IMO, its a good standby for what you can get out of a compiler. The suite is a broad set of industry-accepted applications that represent significant market segments in themselves. Tuning and extracting good performance isnt just a matter of turning some compiler switches on. You can get good gains by analyzing applications carefully and using compiler tunings to improve their performance effectiveness, which is generally what happens in the case of SPEC applications.
Posted by tatkar ( Jun 30 2009, 10:16:22 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Monday June 29, 2009

Three new important Sun Developer Tools update releases: Sun Studio, NetBeans and Clustertools
In the past week, Sun has announced availability of new releases and updates to three of the most interesting Developer tools:

• Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is the latest production release of Sun Studio Compilers and Tools. Among the shiny new features are:
• C, C++, Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based architectures and support for latest Intel and AMD chips, including SSE3, SSE4a, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 instructions
• Compiler, debugger, and profiling support for OpenMP 3.0
• Profiling of distributed MPI-based applications 
• DLight - New tool for unified application and system profiling using Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology on Solaris platforms 
• dbxTool - New stand-alone graphical debugger 
• Highly tuned and parallelized scientific libraries, including ScaLAPACK 
• Updated IDE based on NetBeans 6.5.1 software

• Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.2 offers an integrated toolkit with a  comprehensive set of capabilities for parallel computing that allows developers to create and tune MPI applications that run on high-performance clusters. You get MPI libraries based on Open MPI 1.3.3 standard and ORTE parallel job launcher. It also includes support for Infiniband, shared memory, 10 GbE and Myrinet MX support along with plug-in for Sun Grid Engine, support for third party parallel debuggers (TotalView and Allinea DDT) and is integrated with Sun Studio Analyzer. You can find more information on this release (including Download, Documentation) for Solaris 10, OpenSolaris (both SPARC and x86), and Linuxes (RHEL5, SLES10 and CentOS 5) here: http://www.sun.com/software/products/clustertools 

• NetBeans 6.7 has shipped.  The primary focus of this release was connectivity: helping developers connect to the latest technologies and to each other. NetBeans 6.7 now offers:
• Integration with Project Kenai 
• Native support for Maven 
• Support for GlassFish (v3) 
• Issue tracker and Hudson integrations 
• Support for JavaScript 1.7 
• Ruby remote debugging 
• Integration of the Java ME SDK 3.0
  

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