The latest Top500 list published in November shows three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems. Sun also doubled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 11 deployments providing nearly 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS). Additionally, Sun announced new products and technologies for high performance computing (HPC), an upgrade to the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, new HPC benchmarks and new HPC customers.

Several knowledgeable hands at Sun have collaborated in preparing the Sun BluePrints Online document "The Solaris Operating System Optimized -- for the AMD Opteron Processor." The authors state their intention was to create a quick reference guide for developers and system administrators who want to optimize applications running on Solaris 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 multicore AMD Opteron processors.

With all the capabilities available in Sun Studio compilers and tools, developers would do well to avail themselves of the opportunity to make use of the increased performance and numerous features of these solutions by having a look at the article by Diane Meirowitz on "Translating gcc/g++/gfortran Options to Sun Studio Compiler Options."