The Itanium Solutions Blog

Greetings! Intel continues our productive collaboration with Sun Microsystems on porting Sun’s J2SE implementation to Itanium® architecture, resulting in a regular cadence of Itanium® releases with constantly improving performance, security, and overall quality. Some time ago we released JDK & JRE 6u13 for Itanium, a security update release. Now I’m glad to attract your attention to the 6u14 release for Itanium which has just been made available at the Java™ SE download site.

The 6u14 release includes improved performance on a range of server workloads. This is achieved with both platform independent work described in Java SE 6 Update 14 Release Notes and Itanium specific improvements such as optimized memory copy routines and C2 JIT compiler enhancements. Also in 6u14 we enabled the Serviceability Agent on Windows/Itanium, with a few limitations described here. In 6u12 for Itanium, the Serviceability Agent was included in the Linux distribution only. And of course the 6u14 release for Itanium contains the enhancements and fixes described in Java SE 6 Update 14 Release Notes, but with a few exceptions related to new features: the Garbage First (G1) garbage collector and the Compressed object pointers are not yet ported to Itanium. We are working to enable those features for Itanium and the results may be available in one of the future update releases later this year. For more information about the release including command line options for maximum performance please refer to the Java SE 6 Update 14 for Itanium Release Notes.

Another important event which happened since my previous post was the JavaOne 2009 conference.  JavaOne is the largest and the most significant conference in the Java world, a gathering of thousands of Java developers.  In the pavilion, showcasing latest accomplishments in the Java technologies, we presented a demo devoted to Java 6 for Itanium® architecture.  An eye-catchy animation demonstrated comparative SPECjbb2005 performance on several J2SE 6 releases for Itanium including the latest 6u14, on the currently available dual-core Intel® Itanium® Series 9100 (code name Montvale) and the next generation Itanium® quad-core (code name Tukwila). The demo clearly illustrated substantial boost in 6u14 over 6u12 and the doubling of performance (for that workload) on Tukwila over Montvale.  The flow of visitors to our booth was constant and the booth team talked virtually non-stop in highlighting our results and the Itanium platform.  If you were fortunate enough to see this demo at JavaOne thanks for attending!

That’s all important news I have at the moment.  We are hard at work on our next releases and I’ll soon be back with more updates.  Until then, don’t hesitate to add your comments!

Greetings! As I promised in my previous post, Sun’s JDK&JRE 6u12 for Intel Itanium® Linux and Windows are ready for download at the Java SE download site.

•    Inclusion of control and data speculation optimizations into the global instruction scheduling framework. These optimizations are enabled by  default when AggressiveOpts is enabled.
•    Optimized code sequences for floating point constants. This feature is also enabled when AggressiveOpts is enabled.
•    An additional optimized object allocation and initialization code sequence in C2 compiled methods.
•    An additional optimized code sequence for large switch constructs (i.e. those with many ‘case’ labels). This feature is enabled with the command line flag -XX:+UseJumpTables.

Also, in this release we ported the Serviceability Agent to Linux/Itanium. Even with a number of limitations of its current version for Itanium we hope that the Serviceability Agent will be a useful troubleshooting tool. Windows support will be available in a later release.

As usual, you may find more information about JDK for Itanium at the Itanium Release Notes page, including known issues and suggested workarounds.

We continue working on next releases, improving quality and performance. I will keep you informed as new releases become available.

Greetings! My name is Vyacheslav Shakin, Project Manager at Intel, and this is the first post in what will be a series of blog posts covering the state of Java™ for Intel’s Itanium® Platforms. As you may know, Intel and Sun Microsystems have been collaborating on the development of Sun’s J2SE implementation for Itanium/Linux and Itanium/Windows, culminating in the first release this past October. If you haven’t downloaded those bits (available in both JRE and JDK form), you can access them via the Sun JDK6u11 download pages via these JRE and JDK links. We’ve now had two Hotspot J2SE releases from the Intel/Sun collaboration on Itanium, and the first Hotspot releases for Itanium since back in the Java 1.4.2 days. These new releases are fully Java specification compliant, are well-tested and ready for commercial use, and have been extensively optimized for good application performance on Itanium systems.

Besides re-factoring the base interpreter and profiling infrastructure and adding a new global instruction scheduling component in the JIT compiler, some of the performance enhancements we’ve included in these releases are:
• Itanium specific optimal code generation enhancements
• Tuning of Hotspot’s register allocation to make better use of Itanium’s large register set.
• Compiler modifications to improve Itanium architecture-specific instruction bundling and instruction ordering.

We’re already hard at work on the next release of Java support for Itanium – JDK6u12. The early access version has been posted on Sun’s Java.Net web site, you will need an account to access and download this release. The commercial version of JDK6u12 for Itanium platforms will be released soon, and I’ll be back to post an update once it is available for download. Until then, don’t hesitate to add your comments!

As marketing chair of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I am pleased to say that our new blog is off to a great start.  Visiting the blog regularly is an easy way to stay up-to-date on news surrounding Itanium-based solutions and other items of interest to the Itanium community.  For example:

•    Linux Devices recently offered some independent reporting from an open-source perspective on the Alliance’s news of a successful 2008 and strong momentum for Itanium-based systems. http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7477895313.html.

•    Dr. Dobb’s Portal alerted its readers in the developer community to the news regarding the successful port of Java SE 6 for Itanium.  http://www.ddj.com/java/212901759.

In the near future, the Alliance blog will include important information regarding future releases of Itanium-based solutions, performance enhancements, and developer tips on a range of topics, including Sun Java on Itanium.  I hope you’ll check back on a regular basis; or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance recently announced it reached agreement with Sophos (http://www.sophos.com/), a leading provider of enterprise solutions for IT security and control, to provide a new level of support for Itanium systems running on Linux.

Sophos already supports HP-UX, OpenVMS and Windows (including the recently-released Windows Server 2008) on Itanium-based systems, but with a new release of Sophos Anti-Virus coming in Q4 2008, it will now support Itanium-based systems running Red Hat EL 4.x and Red Hat EL 5.x versions of Linux.

Along with the continuing growth of Linux for mission-critical enterprise applications is, unfortunately, a parallel growth in the attacks on such systems with advanced computer viruses and malware. So the porting of Sophos Anti-Virus to support the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux editions for Itanium is welcome news indeed.

Sophos’ approach to its Enterprise Security products is highly-regarded worldwide and with good reason.  One of the keys to this is a unique approach to what they refer to as “Behavioral Genotype Protection”® and run-time protection algorithms. These systems track not only the presence of known viruses and malware but also their artifacts as well — in registry changes and other data log alterations, all with the end result of identifying the presence of such dangers as early as possible.

Like other companies providing antivirus software, Sophos delivers proven algorithms to identify, quickly disable, and quarantine antivirus threats. But where they are different is their extensive focus on enterprise systems. They understand the importance of providing powerful control tools for setting up and managing the overall IT end-to-end security infrastructure, including centralized installation services, malware alerting mechanisms, and advanced security software appliances to monitor web gateways to your system in real-time.

The combination of these tools is a sophisticated approach to isolating both known and new malware and system threats at their earliest emergence. The tools are accurate, thorough, and run quickly with minimal IT overhead.

Add to this that the new offerings Sophos will provide are some of the most powerful and extensive anti-virus solutions for Itanium-based systems running on Linux, and you have a compelling product any of you Itanium Linux Users out there should be considering.

Watch for it in Q4 2008.