Sun Microsystems today announced that Sun Studio 12 Update 1, a major upgrade to its software compiler and tools technology, is freely available for download at http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio. Sun Studio software provides an advanced suite of tools for the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), OpenSolaris, the next generation of the Solaris OS, and leading Linux platforms, including parallelizing compilers, powerful debuggers, advanced thread and performance analysis tools, and highly-tuned libraries that help simplify the creation of high-performance applications and provide an optimized development environment for the latest multi-core x86 and SPARC-based systems.

"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," said Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Software Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "With more than 20,000 developers participating in our Express and Early Access programs, this release is full of functionality driven by and for the developer community."

New Features Deliver Application Performance

With nearly a dozen industry benchmark records to date, Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software delivers optimized compilers that allow developers to maximize application performance on the newest SPARC, Intel x86 and AMD x86-based systems. Specifically geared towards C, C++ and Fortran developers, Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software helps developers significantly reduce development timelines with DLight, a new visual profiling tool based on Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology in the Solaris OS. In addition, new parallel features help simplify the development of multi-threaded and distributed applications. With enhanced and newly added standard routines, HPC, financial, and other compute-intensive applications will benefit from a performance boost that helps users more easily maximize their hardware investments.

"We are excited about the latest release of Sun Studio software and our continued collaboration with Sun aimed at optimizing Sun Studio compilers and libraries for the latest AMD multi-core architectures,“ said Kevin Wagner, Strategic Alliances Director for Sun Software at AMD. “Sun Studio 12 Update 1 delivers a comprehensive toolchain, enabling developers to generate applications that deliver superior performance on the Third Generation Quad-core and First generation Six-Core AMD Opteron processors."

Simplified Development of Parallel and Concurrent Applications

Optimized for Solaris platforms, Sun Studio 12 Update 1 supports parallel development with features that help developers debug multi-threaded code, isolate common thread issues, and profile thread execution for performance problems. The updated software also offers support for the OpenMP 3.0 API specification, including the new tasking model. Sun Studio 12 Update 1 improves developer productivity with an updated integrated development environment (IDE) and delivers a new standalone GUI debugger, called dbxTool. This powerful code-level debugger includes functionality that identifies memory issues, such as leaks, access errors, and usage. In addition to profiling shared memory applications, Sun Studio 12 Update 1 now adds profiling functionality for distributed MPI-based applications based on a wide variety of MPI runtimes, including Sun HPC ClusterTools software.

Support Services for Developers

Sun offers a tiered set of support services for developer software, including Sun Studio software, which ranges from single incident to comprehensive developer plans. In addition, with a broad portfolio of training and certification offerings, developers can enhance their skillsets to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. To learn more, please visit http://developers.sun.com/services.

For more information about Sun Studio software, visit. http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio. For more information about Sun Studio benchmarks, visit: http://sun.com/benchmarks/software.