Sun Microsystems T5120, T5220 manual Application Selection, Development, Tuning and Debugging

34 Enterprise-Class Software Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Application Selection

Application selection helps identify those applications that stand to benefit from CoolThreads technology. The CoolThreads Selection Tool (coolst) helps determine application suitability for both the UltraSPARC T1 and ULtraSPARC T2 architectures, accelerating the understanding of application execution and helping to take the risk out of investment decisions. The tool measures the number of light-weight processes (threads) to determine potential parallelism.

Development

Developers need to be able to build, test, and evaluate applications, producing the most effective code while advancing their productivity with their chosen tools.

•GCC for SPARC Systems (GCC4SS) — Specifically tuned and optimized for SPARC systems, GCC4SS complements the popular GCC compiler suite, delivering up to three times the performance of compiled applications with even greater levels of reliability. At the same time, GCC4SS is 100 percent compatible with GCC, supporting all ABIs, language extensions, and flags.

•Sun Studio 12 — Sun Studio 12 provides developers with the latest record-setting, high-performance, optimizing C, C++, and FORTRAN compiler compilers for the Solaris OS on SPARC and x86/x64 platforms. Command-line tools and a NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) are provided for application performance analysis and debugging of mixed source language applications. In addition to providing multi-platform support, Sun Studio 12 compilers are compatible with GCC, Visual C++, C99, OpenMP, and FORTRAN 2003.

•Binary Improvement Tool (BIT) and Simple Performance Optimization Tool (SPOT) — Used for code coverage analysis, BIT provides instruction and call count data at run time, helping to significantly improve developer productivity and application performance. BIT does not require source code, and works with both executables and libraries. SPOT also helps deliver improved developer productivity by automating the gathering and reporting of code data.

•Sun Memory Error Discovery Tool (Discover) — Memory access errors can be one of the hardest types of errors to detect, since symptoms of the error typically appear arbitrarily far from the point where the error occurred. The Sun Memory Error Discovery Tool (Discover) is designed to detect and report common memory access errors. Reported errors include accessing uninitialized memory, writing past the end of an array, or accessing memory after it has been freed.

Tuning and Debugging

Administrators and developers alike need to monitor, analyze, and tune applications under real-world conditions. The following tools aid with tuning and debugging: