Re: Sun shows Rock first silicon

On 16 Apr, 22:30, koeh...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
In article <4622086e$0$16392$88260...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Neil Rieck" <n.ri...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
###
"Rock is 16 cores - we haven't said how many threads per core. Nor have we
said why this chip heralds the golden age of effortless parallel
programming, or how it brings fault tolerance to the masses. But stay tuned,
I think we're planning on talking up both in the next few weeks."

In the past, we've disclosed that Rock will run two threads per core, giving
it 32 threads per chip. In addition, the 256TB of memory described by
Schwartz would come via a 8-socket box that holds 512 DIMMs, depicted here.
Our sources have indicated that Sun stopped work on systems any larger than
the Platinum box.

###

But do they have a compiler than can provide "effortless parallel
programming"?


Thread level parallelism is relatively easy to exploit. Oracle, J2EE
environments do it without you having to write code yourself.

When I looked at generated code I was impressed what DEC's compilers
would do for parallel operations on 21064 (two threads). But most
of the Sun users I've worked with just grab the gnu compilers. I'm
not holding my breath waiting for gcc to keep 32 threads busy. Can
I convince my Sun users to buy a professionally written compiler,
and if so, what assurances do I get that it will keep 32 threads busy,
or do I have to make sure I have 16 active processes to keep the 16
cores busy?


Actually many people now use the SunCompilers which are free with
Solaris rather than GCC and Sun's compilers do quite a good job of
parallelisation. Sun have even posted some multi-cpu SPEC results (not
SPECrate) using auto parallel options on the compilers.

As I said you don't need to convince your Sun users to buy anything,
the compilers are free.

Regards
Andrew

.

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  • Re: Sun shows Rock first silicon
    ... When I looked at generated code I was impressed what DEC's compilers ... would do for parallel operations on 21064. ... not holding my breath waiting for gcc to keep 32 threads busy. ... I convince my Sun users to buy a professionally written compiler, ...
    (comp.os.vms)