Sunny Multicore Days Ahead? Maybe? Kinda?

Posted by Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes @ 02:53:PM | June 26, 2009

So maybe there is hope for the Sun worshipers after all. In a recent interview (Reuters May 7, 2009), Oracle's Larry Ellison made a commitment to further SPARC technology. "We want to work with Fujitsu to design advanced features into the SPARC microprocessor aimed a improving Oracle database performance".

Ellison further stated:

Sun was very successful for a very long time selling computer systems based on the SPARC chip and the Solaris operating system. Now with the added power of integrated Oracle software we think they can be again.

At Ctest Labs, we do have a big commitment to Sparc's theory of multicore. The Solaris operating system is also a major part of our infrastructure. We use Solaris both with Sparc and Opteron technology. If Tracey and I are gonna crash and burn while trying to solve AI-Complete problems, we might as well do it with Sparc technology. The thought of loosing Sparc or Solaris as the result of some silly-ole merger... Well, for awhile there, it was almost "goodbye cruel world". Now with Ellison's apparent support for Sparc, there's just a little more twist in my wrist when I hit the return key on my T1. After stumbling across the Ellison interview I went to the console of my Sun-Fire-T200 and typed:

/usr/sbin/psrinfo -v ; uname -X

and comforted each and everyone of my 8 cores and their 4 little hardware threads (32 logical cpus) letting them know not to worry that we're gonna have support and a future. After all, Mr. Ellison said so!.

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Real World Parallelism Webinar Series

  • February 18, 2010
    Lock Contention, Using Intel Parallel Studio to Improve Performance
    Speaker: Vasanth Tovinkere, Software Engineer, Intel Corporation (Bio)

    Vasanth Tovinkere is a software engineer in the Developer Products Division (DPD) at Intel. His current role involves defining novel approaches to understanding and visualizing parallel performance and consulting with strategic customers to help them prepare and deliver code for the multicore world. Vasanth has been involved in the development of automatic semantic event detectors for digital sports technologies in Intel Labs. He also has been awarded three patents and has two patents pending.

    Abstract:
    Discover how easy it is to use the power of Microsoft Visual Studio and Intel Parallel Studio to find performance issues due to lock contention in threaded applications. This ensures that shipped applications can take better advantage of multicore processors. In this webcast, we provide live demonstrations that show how to identify lock contentions issues with Visual Studio and Intel Parallel Studio, an add-in to Visual Studio that helps developers create fast, reliable code on multicore processors.t.