Sun Tunes Solaris Express Developer Edition for Enhanced Multicore Development

Sun Microsystems, Inc., (NASDAQ: SUNW), today announced new functionality for Solaris Express Developer Edition, including new compilers and development tools, to help application developers create better applications faster. The OpenSolaris-based distribution offers developers for the Solaris Operating System (OS), Java platform, and Web 2.0 applications a new set of products which are optimized for the newest multicore architectures. Solaris Express Developer Edition was created using the most current OpenSolaris community source code contributions and includes Sun Studio 12 software to accelerate application performance by parallelizing C, C++, and Fortran applications.


“Software developers increasingly demand innovative platforms and tools to allow their applications to take maximum advantage of multi-core chip architectures, such as the market-leading 32-thread Sun UltraSPARC T1. The new threading tools and compiler optimizations in Sun Studio 12 provide an advanced suite of tools and libraries that ease the development of applications on the newest multi-core SPARC and x86-based systems,” said Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing for Sun. “Coupled with the advantages of the underlying platform, the Solaris OS provides leadership in the development and deployment of next generation multicore applications.”

The new release of Solaris Express Developer Edition offers a modern GNOME-based desktop including Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0 beta 2, and StarOffice 8 update 6 software. In addition, this update includes NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 5.5 for the development of desktop, web, and enterprise Java applications. Sun Studio 12 includes auto parallelizing compilers and support for the OpenMP 2.5 API, and has a new feature that identifies at runtime many common but difficult-to-detect multithreading issues, such as race and deadlock conditions. Combined with a next-generation IDE, Sun Studio 12 software offers a complete, integrated, easy-to-use toolchain for those that develop for the most advanced OS on the planet.

Sun Studio 12 software uses innovative optimization techniques on x86 systems to deliver up to 25% better performance on compute-intensive benchmarks, and up to 80% better performance for memory-intensive, industry-recognized benchmarks.

Additional functionality includes new wireless drivers, the first phase of a project to automatically configure network interfaces, new Xorg server enhancements and new X windows libraries, plus a DTrace provider to allow tracing X client applications.

Solaris Express Developer Edition supports a wide variety of common x86-based desktop and laptop hardware, and has been optimized for servers being developed based on Sun’s 64-thread Niagara 2 processor. The Sun Blade 6000 blade server supports SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel processors running Solaris Express Developer Edition, the industry leading developer OS for those processors.

Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 is available to download today at www.sun.com/sxde and is the second iteration of a new distribution based on the OpenSolaris project, providing developers with a fully integrated environment for developing applications for Solaris, Java technology, and Web 2.0. Solaris Express Developer Edition offers simplified installation so developers can get Solaris up and running more easily, saving time and effort, and Sun Developer Expert Assistance is available for developers to can get coding advice and learn best practices for development. Solaris Express Developer Edition is being developed in the OpenSolaris community, and Sun plans to release regular updates with additional capabilities and ease of use enhancements.



About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
A singular vision -- “The Network Is The Computer” -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.