Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 – Now Available!

Posted on December 14, 2011 by koberoi

This latest release delivers on the promise of:

  • Maximum ROI with up to 3x faster applications on SPARC- and x86-based systems
  • Improved time-to-deliver with advanced tools that benefit from the integrated relationship with the compilers
  • Protection of application investment with the strongest compatibility in the industry

      • Freely available for production use on Oracle Solaris and Linux operating systems, you can download it from the Oracle Technology Network(OTN):

      http://www.oracle.com/goto/solarisstudio

      Highlights include:

      • 3x faster code on SPARC T4 than common open source compilers; 40% faster than Sun Studio 12
      • 1.5x faster code on Intel x86 than common open source compilers; 20% faster than Sun Studio 12
      • New Code Analyzer for more reliable applications; reports common coding & memory access errors faster than competitive alternatives
      • Enhanced Performance Analyzer with system-wide performance analysis
      • Remote access to Solaris Studio tools from local desktop (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Oracle Solaris)
      • Streamlined Oracle DB application development
      • 20% faster compile time


      Check out screenshots of the GUI tools.

      The IPS version is in its final stages and will be available soon.

      See the What’s New in the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 Release guide for complete details.

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Installing Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 (tarfile) on Solaris 11 Express

Posted on November 19, 2010 by koberoi

Until Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 becomes available via a Solaris 11 Express publisher, one can download the tarfile and use the compilers and tools. Here’s how:

1. Download Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2

In the table, pick the download in the “Tarfile” column and the “Solaris 10 OS on SPARC” or “Solaris 10 OS on x86″ row, depending on your architecture.

2. Unpack the tarfile

bzcat download_directory/SolarisStudio12.2-[OS]-[PLATFORM]-[FORMAT]-ML.tar.bz2 | /bin/tar -xf -

3. Update PATH

I updated my .profile directly

4. Add necessary Solaris packages to use Oracle Solaris Studio. Here’s the complete list of Solaris packages that Solaris Studio needs:

  • system/library/math
  • developer/macro/cpp
  • system/library/c++/sunpro
  • developer/linker
  • system/header (Not installed by default by LiveCD installation)
  • developer/build/make
  • developer/java/jdk (Not installed by default by LiveCD installation)
  • system/library/math/header-math (Not installed by default by LiveCD installation)
  • developer/library/lint (Not installed by default by LiveCD installation)

To find out if the package is already installed, use the pkg info command:

koberoi@raiders:~$ pkg info system/library/math
Name: system/library/math
Summary: Math & Microtasking Libraries
Description: Math & Microtasking Libraries
Category: System/Libraries
State: Installed
Publisher: solaris
Version: 0.5.11
Build Release: 5.11
Branch: 0.151.0.1
Packaging Date: November 5, 2010 06:11:38 AM
Size: 2.62 MB
FMRI: pkg://solaris/system/library/math@0.5.11,5.11-0.151.0.1:20101105T061138Z

If it is not installed, then you’ll receive a message similar to this:

koberoi@raiders:~$ pkg info system/header
pkg: info: no packages matching the following patterns you specified are
installed on the system. Try specifying -r to query remotely:

system/header

You can then check to see if one of your publishers has it:

koberoi@raiders:~$ pkg info -r system/header
Name: system/header
Summary: SunOS Header Files
Description: SunOS C/C++ header files for general development of software
Category: System/Core
State: Not installed
Publisher: solaris
Version: 0.5.11
Build Release: 5.11
Branch: 0.151.0.1
Packaging Date: November 5, 2010 12:21:36 AM
Size: 11.47 MB
FMRI: pkg://solaris/system/header@0.5.11,5.11-0.151.0.1:20101105T002136Z

You can then install it:

koberoi@raiders:~$ sudo pkg install system/header
Password:
Packages to install: 1
Create boot environment: No
DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB)
Completed 1/1 1499/1499 3.6/3.6

PHASE ACTIONS
Install Phase 1617/1617

PHASE ITEMS
Package State Update Phase 1/1
Image State Update Phase 2/2
koberoi@raiders:~$

And then verify that it is installed:

koberoi@raiders:~$ pkg info system/header
Name: system/header
Summary: SunOS Header Files
Description: SunOS C/C++ header files for general development of software
Category: System/Core
State: Installed
Publisher: solaris
Version: 0.5.11
Build Release: 5.11
Branch: 0.151.0.1
Packaging Date: November 5, 2010 12:21:36 AM
Size: 11.47 MB
FMRI: pkg://solaris/system/header@0.5.11,5.11-0.151.0.1:20101105T002136Z
koberoi@raiders:~$

FYI, to be able to compile/run hello world for C, C++, & Fortran as well as run the IDE on my newly minted Solaris 11 Express installation (from LiveCD), I had to install the following 2 OS packages:

  • system/header (Not installed by default by LiveCD installation)
  • system/library/math/header-math (Not installed by default by LiveCD installation)
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Oracle Solaris 11 Express and Developers

Posted on November 19, 2010 by koberoi

A new version of Solaris has been released: Oracle Solaris 11 Express. Previewing the upcoming Solaris 11 release, Solaris 11 Express is full of new functionality and is supported across a variety of SPARC and x86-based systems.

s11-2

There are a variety of new things for application developers

. You can watch a couple of TechCasts on developers and Oracle Solaris 11 Express as well:

  •   George Drapeau discussing what’s great in Solaris 11 Express for Developers
  •   Don Kretsch and Vijay Tatkar on Oracle Solaris Studio and Oracle Solaris 11 Express

You can download one of the 4 Solaris 11 Express installers that are available here.

Because I’m running Solaris on my desktop, I downloaded the Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 LiveCD for x86 version, which includes both X and GNOME, and have it on my Ultra 20 as well as a VirtualBox machine on my laptop.

Check out the Solaris 11 Express Release Notes. One thing that caught me was that I was unable to run the Package Manager until I read the “Initial Root Password After Live CD Installation” section of the Release Notes and changed my expired root password. (which is the same password you used for your account during installation)

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Oracle Solaris Studio at Oracle OpenWorld / Develop 2010

Posted on September 19, 2010 by koberoi

I, and other folks from the Oracle Solaris Studio team, will be at Oracle Develop during Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco this week. Come learn more about Oracle Solaris Studio and tell us about your development tooling needs and how Oracle Solaris Studio is working for you. Please stop by!

1. Pod: Oracle Solaris Studio at the JavaOne & Oracle Develop Exhibition

Hilton Hotel – Continental Ballroom (HHJ 007)

  • Monday (9:15am-5pm)
  • Tuesday (9:30am-5:30pm)
  • Wednesday (9:30-4:45pm)

2. Session: Multicore Application Programming with Oracle Solaris Studio [S317573]

Monday (9/20), 4pm, Hotel Nikko, Nikko Ballroom I

“Writing correct and fast parallel applications is often considered a hard problem. However, it doesn’t need to be that way. This session will describe how Oracle Solaris Studio can be used to produce applications that are both fast and correct. The talk will cover parallelization strategies, implementation details, and common pitfalls, as well as describing how the tools provided by Oracle Solaris Studio can identify coding errors and performance opportunities in the application.”

Speaker: Darryl Gove, Oracle Performance Analyst

3. Session: Performance Measurement with Oracle Solaris Studio Performance Tools [S317590]

Tuesday (9/21), 11:30am, Hotel Nikko, Peninsula

“In this session, we’ll first describe the importance of performance, how tell if there’s a problem, and how to triage it. We’ll describe the Oracle Solaris Studio Performance Tools and show how they simplify the triaging problem. We’ll then present two simple cases of low-handing fruit in applications, showing how the tools help isolate each type of problem and pointing to the place in the user’s source code where the fixes are needed. We’ll move on to explore CPU and memory performance problems, memory allocation issues, and multithreaded performance problems, in each case showing how the tools can help. Finally, we’ll discuss the applicability of the tools to measuring Java performance.”

Speaker: Marty Itzkowitz, Oracle Senior Principal SW Engineer

4. Unconference Session: Solaris Studio

Wednesday (9/22), 11am, Hotel Parc 55, Ashbury CF

5. Session: Building High-Quality C/C++ Applications [S317585]

Wednesday (9/22), 1pm, Hotel Nikko, Nikko Ballroom II

“There are many challenges for native language developers, such as multicore development, heterogeneous OS development, and compatibility. Oracle Solaris Studio delivers a high-performance C/C++ and Fortran tool chain with parallelizing compilers, code-level and memory debuggers, performance and thread analysis tools, optimized math libraries, and support for the latest parallelizing industry standards. With a next-generation IDE, developing and debugging applications for the multicore era has never been easier. This session will demonstrate how Oracle Solaris Studio addresses the challenges in our industry by addressing the four pillars of application development: performance, parallelism, productivity, and platforms.”

Speaker: Don Kretsch, Oracle Senior Director

Posted in Business, Oracle | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 – Now Available!

Posted on September 8, 2010 by koberoi

Oracle is announcing the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2, the latest release in a 20+ year history of delivering the best integrated development platform for building scalable, secure and reliable mission-critical enterprise and ISV applications. Freely available for production use on Oracle Solaris and Linux operating systems, you can download it from the Oracle Technology Network(OTN):

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/downloads/index.html

Highlights include:

  • C, C++ and Fortran compiler optimizations for the newest Oracle Sun T-series (SPARC T3 & T2), M-series (SPARC64), and x86-based (Intel Nehalem-EX & Westmere-EP) Enterprise Servers, delivering up to 4.8x faster code
  • Improved application profiling with experiment comparison (Performance Analyzer)
  • New thread error detection in binaries (Thread Analyzer)
  • Updated DTrace-based visualization tool (DLight)‏
  • New memory debugger with increased performance (Discover)
  • New code coverage tool (Uncover)
  • Updated OpenMP 3.0 support throughout toolchain
  • Updated IDE, based on NetBeans 6.9.1
  • Optimized performance libraries for the newest SPARC and x86 platforms

See the What’s New in the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 Release guide for complete details.

Posted in Oracle | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Oracle Solaris Studio – Best Optimizing Compilers for x86?

Posted on June 28, 2010 by koberoi

Today, Oracle announced new Sun x86 servers, based on Intel Nehalem EX (Xeon 7500 series) and Westmere processors (Xeon 5600 series). As part of the launch, roughly a dozen+ industry benchmark records were set, with Oracle Solaris Studio contributing to most of them. These records represent best-of-class performance of applications across a wide spectrum, including integer, floating point, and OpenMP enterprise workloads:

SPECint_rate2006 : Sun Fire X4800 server, with eight Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.

SPECfp_rate2006 : Sun Fire X4800 server, with eight Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.

SPECfp_base2006 : Sun Fire X4170 M2 server, with two Intel Xeon X5670 processors.

SPECint_rate2006 : Sun Fire X4470 server, with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.

SPECompM2001 : Sun Fire X4470 server, with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.

SPECompL2001 : Sun Fire X4470 server, with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.

SPECompM2001 : Sun Fire X2270 M2 server, with two Intel Xeon 5600 processor series CPUs

Notably, the system stack that produced these x86 industry records did not include well-known offerings in the x86 market: MS Windows, Linux, HP/IBM hardware, nor Intel or gcc compilers. Rather, apps compiled by Oracle Solaris Studio for Oracle Solaris 10 OS, running on Sun Fire x86 systems. What does that mean to you? If application performance is a requirement for your x86 systems, developing with Oracle Solaris Studio for Oracle Solaris OS-based Sun Fire x86 systems should be a configuration you consider.

Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 Graphic Check out our latest Express release, Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10, which contributed to many of the above benchmarks. You can provide feedback directly to the Studio product team via our Customer Feedback Program, which includes a 5 minute online survey.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. SPEC and the benchmark name SPEComp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Competitive data obtained from www.spec.org as of the date located next to the respective claim. See the website for latest results. For comparison purposes, the terms CPU, chip, and processor are used interchangeably. Each socket can accommodate one chip.

Posted in Oracle | 1 Comment

Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 Video

Posted on June 25, 2010 by koberoi

Don and I taped a short video, while in Don’s office, to introduce Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10, our first Express release here at Oracle.

ossx610_video

It’s been a while since I’ve been behind the camera, and admittedly, the rust shows. :-)

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Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 – Now Available!

Posted on June 23, 2010 by koberoi

I work in the Sun Developer Tools division within Oracle, having joined via the acquisition of Sun earlier this year. As it turns out, our team had been working hard on the next release of our Studio compilers and tools product for Solaris and Linux platforms when the acquisition was completed. While many things continue to stay the same, such as our continued focus on the productivity of software developers in creating high-quality, high-performance, applications, some things did indeed change. New brand, new name, new internal processes, and more. However, the team displayed great agility and focus in delivering our first release, under Oracle, right on time.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10, which can be freely downloaded here:

http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/express/

Sun Studio Express has been renamed Oracle Solaris Studio Express. Supporting both Solaris 10 (SPARC, x86) and Linux distributions (OEL 5, RHEL 5, SuSE 11), Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 will be made available on OpenSolaris in the near future. Downloads included both the package installer (SVR4, RPM) and non-package tarballs.

Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10

Highlights include the following:

  • C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based architectures such as UltraSPARC T2 and SPARC64 VII
  • C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest x86 architectures including Intel® Xeon® 7500 processor series (Nehalem-EX) and 5600 processor series (Westmere-EP)
  • Enhanced debugging and code coverage tooling: a new memory debugger (Discover) provides increased performance & accuracy. Other enhancements include improved debugging of optimized code (OCD), improvements to tcov, and a new code coverage tool (Uncover) which prioritizes unexercised functions.
  • Improved application profiling and observability: enhancements in the Performance Analyzer include the ability to compare multiple experiment runs, new hierarchical tree view of data functionality, and profiling of shell scripts. A new stand-alone DLight observability tool is also included in the release.
  • Updated IDE based on NetBeans 6.8: Oracle Solaris Studio comes with an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the award winning Netbeans IDE, tailored for use with the included compilers and the debugger. This IDE increases developer productivity with a code-aware editor, workflow, and project functionality. The updated IDE provides performance improvements to the code assistance model and new remote development functionality.
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“The luck of the third adventure”

Posted on June 18, 2010 by koberoi

First attempt at blogging was via work- blogs.sun.com. Second attempt was here, at koberoi.com, however, my site was hacked and it started showing up as a malware attack site (according to Google).  Unfortunately, as we remedied the situation, I was unable to save prior postings. So, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning proverbially quoted in Letters addressed to R. H. Horne, “The luck of the third adventure”.

Indeed, let’s hope the 3rd time is a charm!

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