Release Notes
The Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris has been tested under various conditions. The purpose of this document is to list the download and usage instructions, important features, supported platforms, and some known issues that were discovered late.
Image Download and Usage Instructions
This section provides platform-specific download and usage instructions.
 | Important - Read these instructions before you start using the software. |
Mac and Windows users
For best results, download the ISO image. You can burn a DVD to use the image, or you can do a loopback mount via the lofiadm command to use the image.
Solaris, Linux, and Other Unix Users
Download either the ISO image or the CPIO image. Use the gunzip utility to uncompress the image. You can write the ISO image to a DVD.
To extract the CPIO image, use the following command:
% cpio -idmu < location-of-the-image /sun-hpc-software-opensolaris-developer-edition
An Images directory that contains the virtual machine image is created under the root directory.
 | Note You need to uncompress the virtual machine image using bunzip2 and extract it before you start using the image.
|
For more information on how to use a VirtualBox or VMware virtual machine, see Old Getting Started with VMware and VirtualBox Images.
New Features
The new features in this release include the compressed virtual machine images for VMware and VirtualBox. The images are common to 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. You can choose to boot in either of the modes via the options provided in the GRUB menu.
| Note - The VirtualBox image is not available yet. |
The compressed virtual machine images consist of the following software components:
- OpenSolaris 2009.06, with pre-configured zones. The zones include two local zones and one global zone to constitute a three-node configured HPC cluster.
- Sun Grid Engine 6.2u3, which is installed and configured. The global zone is configured as the Grid Engine master host, which is also a submit host. The local zones are configured as execution hosts.
- Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1, which is installed and configured.
- Sun Studio 12 Update 1, which is installed and configured.
- Sun Studio IDE Plugins, which provide a close functional integration of the development environment (Sun Studio Express) and the execution environment (Sun Grid Engine).
- Examples of DTrace and performance analysis, which you can access through shortcuts available on the desktop.
- Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo), which is installed and configured, and you can access through the shortcut available on the desktop.
The product is delivered as a DVD. The image, the documentation and the legal messages reside in the following directories:
- /Images – Contains the image files.
- /License – Contains copyright and license text files.
- /Docs – Contains the Readme HTML file and a PDF "snapshot" of the information wiki.
Follow the instructions on how to get started on the VMware and VirtualBox virtual machine images contained in the Images directory.
Supported Platforms
The supported platforms for this product are the platforms that support VMware and VirtualBox. The system and software requirements for VirtualBox and VMware images are as follows:
VirtualBox
- VirtualBox 2.0
- Host Operating system supported by VirtualBox - For a list of supported operating systems, refer to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes.
- RAM - Minimum 2 GB
- Processor - Any x86/x64 processor that supports VirtualBox 2.0
VMware
- VMware Server 2.0 or VMplayer 2.5.0
- Host operating system - Any operating system supported by VMware Server 1.0.7 or VMplayer 2.5.0
- RAM - Minimum 2 GB
- Processor - Any x86/x64 processor that supports VMware Server 1.0.7 or VMplayer 2.5.0
Known Issues and Limitations
SGE Inspect Configuration
For adding new Sun Grid Engine connections from SGE Inspect, use the following parameters:
- In the Connection field, for <hostname>, use hpcdistro.
- In the Connection field, for <port>, use 6446.
- Leave the password field empty for the root user.
Deploying 64-bit Applications on EC2 is Not Supported Yet
Currently, only a 32-bit HPC AMI is available for the Amazon EC2 cloud. The 64-bit HPC AMI is not available yet. As a result, you can only deploy 32-bit applications on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Make sure that you compile and build 32-bit binaries for the applications that you want to deploy on the Amazon EC2 cloud.
DTrace Limitations in Local Zones
In local zones, DTrace has functional limitations. Only syscall and profile providers can run in local zones. Other providers such as sched, proc, io and pid are not supported on local zones.
Images for VirtualBox
The product image for VirtualBox is not availabe yet. It will be made available on the Sun Download Cener when it becomes available.
Sun Grid Engine
You cannot configure a global zone as both the master node and the execution node in a cluster that includes the global and local zones on one machine. In the HPC virtual machine images, the global zone is configured to be a submit and master node.
Sun HPC ClusterTools
The virtual machines cannot virtualize InfiniBand RDMA support. Thus, in a virtual machine environment, non-TCP use of InfiniBand is not available for MPI.
Sun HPC ClusterTools Support
Sun HPC ClusterTools is not supported on systems without Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) support. If the host operating system does not support SSE2, Sun HPC ClusterTools will not work within the virtual machine.
Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Performance Analyzer
The performance analyzer that is part of Sun Studio Update 1 in virtual machine environments does not support hardware counters, and thus those fields will be shown as zeros. As a result, any data that are based on hardware counters displayed on the performance analyzer GUI will not be reliable.
Sun Studio 12 Update 1 in 64-bit Mode
Sun Studio 12 Update 1 does not start in 64-bit mode because a specific library is not available in 64-bit mode. As a result, on a 64-bit machine, Sun Studio 12 Update 1 starts in 32-bit mode.