A question that I often get. Until today, my response has been that our latest FCS release that supports all our platforms is Sun Studio 12 (released in the summer of 2007) and folks can get access to features going into the next major release via the Sun Studio Express program, which puts out builds every 3 months or so. However, with the announcement of the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access program, I can now say it is right-around-the-corner! As an integrated toolchain of compilers, code/memory/thread debuggers, performance analysis, IDE, and optimized libs, we have something new for most folks.

Our Early Access (EA) program invites C, C++, and Fortran developers on OpenSolaris, Solaris, & Linux operating systems to take our feature-complete build for a spin and provide the product team feedback that we use to evaluate readiness for release as well as gather input for future development. Of course, as a signal to our community that an FCS release is coming soon, it allows users to began the evalution towards adoption with their projects.

What’s involved in the program?

• Download Sun Studio Express 3/09 (this is the EA build)
• Join the discussion in the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access forum
• File any RFEs or bugs at http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/
• Take 5 minutes to fill out a survey (available on Wednesday, March 25)

Who would interested in this program? Sophisticated best-of-the-best developers who…

• Develop C, C++, & Fortran apps on OpenSolaris, Solaris, and/or Linux (RHEL, SUSE, Ubuntu, etc.)
• Want their apps to scream on UltraSPARC, SPARC64, Intel x86, and AMD x86 architectures
• Need the best tools availabel to help their apps take advantage of all those cores / threads
• Want tooling that utilize DTrace technology to identify app/system performance bottlenecks
• Need a state-of-the-art IDE, including remote development capabilities
• Want analysis tools to tune their cluster/MPI applications

Check out the README for more details on what’s new.

Looking forward to your feedback!

http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone

There will be two conferences in 2009:

CommunityOne East – March 18-19, 2009 (NY)
CommunityOne West – June 1-2, 2009 (SF)

See the conference web site for more complete details, but there is a “Native Development” track for content on C/C++/Fortran development, OpenMP/MPI, etc. and it will be great to see OUR community participate. The deadline to submit a proposal for a technical session (50 minutes), panel (50 minutes), or a 5-minute lightening talk is coming up quick- Monday, December 15.

http://www.eventreg.com/sun/communityone09/cfp

Participate in one or both conferences!  If you are short on time- submit a proposal for a 5-minute lightening talk and let us know about what you’re working on.

Hope to see you there!

From 128 hardware threads in UltraSPARC T2-based Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 to the 32-core AMD Barcelona-based Sun Fire X4600 and 16-core Intel Xeon-based Sun Fire X4450, hardware parallelism is not our future, but our present. In a shared memory environment, how does software take advantage of hardware parallelism?

1. Application consolidation via virtualization such as Sun xVM
2. Application deployment in multithreaded containers such as web and app servers, including Glassfish
3. Creating multithreaded applications using POSIX and OpenMP, simplified with advanced tooling as in Sun Studio software

Multithreaded development is not simple- developers have to avoid common pitfalls, such as data race and deadlock conditions. In addition, understanding thread performance and interaction becomes important. Because of this, we added tooling in Sun Studio 12 around these areas. In addition to POSIX threads (pthreads) support, we have support (compiler, debugger, analyzer, etc.) for OpenMP, which is a declarative way of doing multithreaded development. While easing development and allowing parallelization around loop structures, OpenMP didn’t provide as much benefit for task-based threading models, until now.

Available today for OpenSolaris 2008.05, Solaris and Linux OSs, Sun Studio Express 7/08, the most recent preview build of the next production release now features…

1. OpenMP 3.0 support
2. Performance Analysis of MPI applications
3. Updated IDE based on NetBeans IDE 6.1
4. Improved Performance for Intel, AMD, UltraSPARC, and SPARC64-based systems

Check out the release notes for complete details and download a free, unrestricted, copy today!

For those doing cluster development using MPI, this release integrates with Sun HPC ClusterTools, based on OpenMPI, and includes new analysis features. Check out the screenshots:

I am retiring my first go at blogging and starting this one up, with renewed energy and my very own domain. I’m passionate about technology, including software development, as well as sports and my family.

My father worked in the computer field at companies like Singer/Link, Sun Microsystems, and now at Apple, Inc. From when he first brought home an Apple II Plus and I started to see what I could do with Logo and Basic, I became interested in computer technology. I’ve gone from systems programming at Apple and creating web applications during the Web 1.0 build-out to where I am today- product marketing of developer tools (NetBeans, Sun Studio software) and Linux community relations at Sun Microsystems. More here and at my Sun bio.

The infinite power of our imaginations are only limited by the technologies we have to implement them. This is what makes the progress of technology so interesting.