The Solaris Operating System—Optimized for the AMD Opteron Processor 
by Jonathan Chew, Kuriakose Kuruvilla, Eric Saxe, Sherry Moore, Ikroop Dhillon, Yonghong Song, David Seberger, Nawal Copty, David Dagastine and David Cox
July 2009
This document is intended as a quick reference guide for developers that want to optimize applications running on the Solaris™ Operating System and AMD Opteron™ processors. The paper describes technical details about specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris ecosystem to make the best use of today's powerful multicore AMD Opteron processors.
Contents
- Introduction
- Sun and AMD Innovation
- The Solaris Ecosystem
- Scalable Multicore Performance
- Overview
- Optimized for Multicore Processors
- AMD HyperTransport™ Technology
- NUMA
- Performance Event Counters on Solaris
- Power Management
- Power Aware Dispatcher
- Reliability and Availability
- Fast Reboot
- Java™ Technology Optimization
- Virtualization
- Overview
- Developer Tools Optimizations
- Sun™ Studio Overview
- Sun Studio Compiler Optimization Flags
- Improved Microvectorization and Automatic Parallelization
- Instruction Selection
- OpenMP Development with Sun Studio
- Record-setting Benchmarks
- Performance Improvements
- Best Integer Throughput and Top x86 Floating Point Throughput Results
- World Record Price/performance on 3000 GB TPC-H Benchmark
- World Record Performance on 30000 GB TPC-H Benchmark
- Leading Eight-Processor Server on Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark
- First Large-scale Grid Validation for the SAS Business Analytics Framework
- Additional Information and Current Benchmark Results from Sun and AMD
- Technical Resources
- Developer Resources
- System Administrator Resources
- Ordering Sun Documents
- Accessing Sun Documentation Online
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgements
Jonathan Chew is a Staff Engineer and the Technical Lead for Solaris CMT and NUMA at Sun Microsystems. He received a bachelor's degree in Applied Math (Computer Science) at UC Berkeley.
Kuriakose Kuruvilla is a Kernel Engineer at Sun Microsystems and works on enabling OpenSolaris support for Intel processors. He received an MSE from Johns Hopkins University and a BTech from University of Kerala.
Eric Saxe is a Staff Engineer and the Technical Lead for Solaris Advanced Power Management at Sun Microsystems. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.
Sherry Moore is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Solaris Core Kernel Group. She has been with Sun Microsystems since 1997, and led various software teams for both SPARC and x86. She is currently the technical lead for the Solaris Engineering's x86 Kernel Team.
Ikroop Dhillon is the Product Marketing Manager for Sun Studio Software (C/C++/Fortran compilers and tools) at Sun Microsystems. She is responsible for product marketing, web strategy and business development. Prior to joining Sun, she was a Technical Marketing Engineer at Intel where she enabled Tier 1 OEM accounts to launch enterprise class desktop and notebook PCs with integrated security and manageability features. A Cum Laude graduate from the University of Washington with a BS in Computer Science, Ikroop started her career as a Software Consultant for Hitachi Consulting where she specialized in delivering custom enterprise solutions to her clients.
Yonghong Song received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Purdue University. He joined Sun Microsystems in 2001. His work focuses on compiler optimizations, specifically in the area of automatic parallelization, memory and cache locality enhancement, data prefetching and interprocedural analysis and optimization.
David Seberger is the Technical Lead on Sun Studio x86. David has authored and coauthored several patents relating to multiprocessing technology. David received a Master's degree in Computer Science from University of California, Davis, and undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from U. C. Irvine.
Nawal Copty leads the OpenMP project at Sun. She is Sun's representative on the OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) and the OpenMP language committee. She currently holds the post of Secretary of the ARB. Nawal received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University in 1995. Her interests include compilers, parallel algorithms, and languages and tools for multi-threaded programming.
The authors like to thank the following individuals for expertise and guidance in preparing this document:
Kevin Wagner, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Christophe Harle, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
George Herman, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Boris Ostrovsky, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Chris Baker, Sun Microsystems
Herb Hinstorff, Sun Microsystems
Darrin Johnson, Sun Microsystems
Mike Mulkey, Sun Microsystems
Kirk Wells, Sun Microsystems
Angel Camacho, Sun Microsystems
Mark Johnson, Sun Microsystems
Susan Wu, Sun Microsystems
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