Sun Microsystems is shipping an upgrade to its Linux-compatible Sun Studio software compiler and toolchain, boasting faster compiling and a new visual profiling tool. In addition to announcing Sun Studio 12 Update 1, Sun announced version 2.0 of its HPC Software Linux Edition, touted for “faster and simpler cluster deployments.”

The Sun Studio software toolchain can be used with Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, as well as with Solaris/OpenSolaris on SPARC processors. Geared towards C, C++ and Fortran developers, Sun Studio provides parallelizing compilers, performance and thread analysis tools, and memory and code debuggers. The software also supplies a NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE), says Sun, which is scheduled to be acquired by Oracle this summer.

Major new features in Sun Studio 12 Update 1 are said to include:

• Optimized compilers for the latest SPARC, Intel x86, and AMD x86-based systems
• New "DLight" visual profiling tool, based on Solaris' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology
• New parallel features to simplify the development of multi-threaded and distributed applications
• Enhanced and newly added standard routines, to increase performance of HPC, financial, and other compute-intensive applications
• Support for the OpenMP 3.0 API specification, including the new tasking model
• Updated IDE for greater developer productivity
• New standalone GUI code-level debugger, called dbxTool, with tools for identifying memory issues, such as leaks, access errors, and usage
• New profiling functionality for distributed MPI-based applications based on a wide variety of MPI runtimes, including Sun HPC ClusterTools software (see below)

New Linux HPC software

Sun has also updated its Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition to version 2.0, making it faster and easier to install Linux-based HPC (high-performance computing) environments, says the company. The software is said to integrate a Linux software stack for HPC solutions, and gives customers a choice of running SUSE 10, CentOS, or Red Hat Linux.

Sun also upgraded its related, Linux-compatible Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.2 software, which provides MPI libraries and a Runtime environment based on Open MPI, says the company. Designed for HPC cluster systems, the software is said to offer interconnect support, including IB QDR and IB multi-rail for improved performance and scalability.

In addition, Sun announced an HPC design with Toshiba Research Europe, which was said to have recently replaced five racks of white-box systems with two Sun Blade 6000 chassis equipped with Sun Blade X6450 server modules. The modules are in turn powered by Intel Xeon six-core processors. The wireless research group is also said to be deploying Sun HPC Software with Linux and Sun Grid Engine software.

Stated Jim McHugh, VP, Datacenter Software Marketing, Sun Microsystems, "Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software has not only significant updates that help developers take applications to the next level of performance, but is also leading the industry with tooling that allows developers to more easily create parallel and concurrent software applications on today's and tomorrow's platforms."

Availability

Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is said to be freely available for download, here. More information on Sun Studio may be found here. More information on Sun's HPC software should be here.

 
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