ACADEMIA

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the results of the latest series of benchmark tests using Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the Sun Studio 10 software and the highest performing Sun Fire servers. The company delivered world record results on the industry-standard SPEC OMPM2001 and SPEC JBB2000 benchmarks, further demonstrating the commitment to extend performance to the leading edge for the entire product line. For a complete list of Solaris 10 benchmark records, visit: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/benchmarks.xml. Sun Studio 10 Software: A Proven Track Record for Top Performance Today Sun announced the new world record SPEC OMPM2001 results in the two- and four-thread categories, further showcasing the power of the Sun Studio 10 software and Solaris 10 OS duo coupled with the latest Sun Fire servers, which provide excellent deployment platforms for a number of high-performance and compute-intensive applications. For instance, the Sun Fire V40z server in a four CPU configuration, produced a peak result of 12,434, beating the 8,694 score reported with SuSe Linux and the leading commercially available compiler, by up to 43 percent. Additionally, the latest performance advances in the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE 5.0), which was compiled using Sun Studio 10 software, allow Sun to claim a new world record on the Sun Fire V40z server -- the four-way, 64-bit SPEC JBB2000 result. The Sun Fire V40z server crossed the 110,000 JBB operations per second (JBBops/s) mark and set a new high watermark score of 116,142 JBBops/s. The newest record on the SPEC JBB2000 benchmark, which measures the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine, as well as the performance of the underlying operating system and the scalability of the system's processors and memory, clearly demonstrates that Solaris 10 can deliver better results when used in combination with top-performing servers from Sun. Since their introduction, Sun's range of x64 systems with the AMD Opteron processors continue to outperform comparably configured IBM and HP servers equipped with Power5 and Alpha processors, respectively. The Sun Fire V40z server, in a two-way configuration, outruns the two-way Power5-based IBM eServer OpenPower 710 server by more than 32 percent using half the number of parallel threads(3) and in a four-way configuration it beats the HP AlphaServer GS1280 7/1300 by up to 51 percent(4). Most importantly, Sun's customers now can reap the performance benefits of the Sun Studio 10 software compiler, which provided an 11 percent performance boost on the same hardware configuration, when compared with the previous top SPECompM2001 result obtained under Linux using the third-party, award-winning compiler suite. The SPEC OMPM2001 benchmark is a test of the performance of 11 High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. All C and FORTRAN applications in this suite use the OpenMP programming model and were compiled using the Sun Studio 10 software. OpenMP is a specification for a set of compiler directives, library routines and environment variables that can be used to specify shared memory parallelism in FORTRAN and C/C++ programs. In addition to the parallelization controls, the programmer also has to declare the scope of many of the variables used in a parallel region. Dieter an Mey, high-performance computing team lead at RWTH Aachen University, has reported that this variable scoping is generally the most tedious and error-prone aspect of using OpenMP to parallelize programs. an Mey's team worked with Sun to add a unique autoscoping extension to Sun Studio 10's FORTRAN compiler. With the Sun Studio 10 product, FORTRAN developers can now further increase their productivity by asking the compiler to utilize data dependence analysis to automatically determine the scope of their variables within parallel regions. Sun Microsystems is a corporate sponsor of IWOMP 2005, the First International Workshop on OpenMP to be held in Eugene, Oregon on June 1-4, 2005. On the Net: http://www.nic.uoregon.edu/iwomp2005/.