The Solaris Operating System---Optimized for the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series 
by Jonathan Chew, Kuriakose Kuruvilla, Eric Saxe, Rafael Vanoni, Sherry Moore, Juanita Heieck, Ikroop Dhillon, Yi Gao, Yonghong Song, David Seberger, and Nawal Copty
June 2009
This document is intended as a quick reference guide for developers and system administrators that want to optimize the Solaris™ OS on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series platform. The paper includes a short overview of the Sun and Intel collaboration, and brief technical descriptions of specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris OS to optimize the specific capabilities of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series- systems, specifically in the areas of:
- Intelligent performance
- Automated energy efficiency
- Reliability and availability
- Developer tools optimizations
Contents
- Introduction
- Background
- The Solaris Ecosystem
- Intelligent Performance
- Overview
- Performance Counters on Solaris
- Automated Energy Efficiency
- Power Aware Dispatcher
- PowerTOP for OpenSolaris
- Reliability and Availability
- Fast Reboot
- Support for Microcode Updates on Intel Processors
- Developer Tools Optimizations
- Sun Studio Overview
- Utilizing New Processor Instructions with the Solaris OS
- Improved Microvectorization and Automatic Parallelization
- Instruction Selection
- OpenMP Development with Sun Studio
- Record-setting Benchmarks
- SPECint2006
- SPECfp2006
- SPECompL2001
- Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark
- TPC-H benchmark at 1,000 GB scale factor
- Thomson Reuters Market Data System Benchmark
- SPECjvm2008
- SPECjbb2005
- SPECompM2001
- Appendices
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgements
- Ordering Sun Documents
- Accessing Sun Documentation Online
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.
Rafael Vanoni is a Kernel Engineer at Sun Microsystems and works on enabling OpenSolaris support for Intel processors. He received a Bachelor's of Science at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
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.
Juanita Heieck is a Senior Technical Writer in the Sun Learning Services organization at Sun Microsystems. She writes basic and advanced system administration documentation for a wide range of Solaris features, including booting, networking topics, and printing.
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.
Yi Gao is a Software Engineer in C, C++, Optimization and Debugging team. He joined Sun in 2005 and since that time, he has been working on compiler optimization, microvectorization and performance tuning.
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:
Maxim Alt, Intel Corporation
Eric Fox, Intel Corporation
Robert Kasten, Intel Corporation
Greg O'Keefe, Intel Corporation
Frank Wang, Intel Corporation
Chris Baker, Sun Microsystems
Scott Crase, Sun Microsystems
Adrian Frost, Sun Microsystems
Herb Hinstorff, Sun Microsystems
Darrin Johnson, Sun Microsystems
Mike Mulkey, Sun Microsystems
Yukon Murayama, Sun Microsystems
Krishnendu Sadhukhan, Sun Microsystems
Yufei Zhu, Sun Microsystems
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