Solaris 10, Sun Studio 10 on Sun Fire V40z set new 2-thread and 4-thread world records on SPEC OMPM2001 (2 world records

Sun announced the new world record SPEC OMPM2001 results in the two- and four-thread categories, further showcasing the power of the Sun Studio 10 and Solaris 10 OS duo coupled with the latest Sun Fire servers, which provide excellent deployment platforms for a number of high-performance and compute-intensive applications. For instance, the Sun Fire V40z server in a four CPU configuration, produced a peak result of 12,434, beating the 8,694 score reported with SuSe Linux and the leading commercially available compiler, by up to 43 percent1.

Since their introduction, Sun's x64 systems with the AMD Opteron processor continue to outperform comparably configured IBM and HP servers equipped with Power5 and Alpha processors, respectively. The Sun Fire V40z server, in a two-way configuration2, outruns the two-way Power5-based IBM eServer OpenPower 710 server by more than 32 percent using half the number of parallel threads3 and in a four-way configuration it beats the HP AlphaServer GS1280 7/1300 by up to 51 percent4.

The SPEC OMPM2001 benchmark is a test of the performance of 11 High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. All C and FORTRAN applications in this suite use the OpenMP programming model and were compiled using the Sun Studio 10 software.

OpenMP is a specification for a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that can be used to specify shared memory parallelism in Fortran and C/C++ programs and requires the user to declare the scope of each variable used in a parallel region.