FRAMINGHAM (11-10-95) - SunSoft Inc. this week released a version of its WorkShop tool set designed to exploit the company's Solaris 2.5 operating system and Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.'s (SMCC) new 64-bit Ultra-SPARC processor.
Solaris 2.5, formally unveiled this week, features a wide range of performance improvements for graphics, imaging, multiuser time-sharing applications and multithreaded applications. UltraSPARC is an advanced Reduced Instruction Set Computing processor that will support 64-bit applications and very large data sets.
WorkShop is SunSoft's development environment for building networked applications that can make the most of the underlying operating system and processor architecture.
Release 2.0 includes a feature that dissects code written in C and distributes it to run on two or more processors. New compilers make application development and deployment faster than before. And a library of high-performance computing algorithms has been extended for UltraSPARC, so applications simply issue a function call to access this computational power.
Also in the works is a WorkShop version for SMCCs Java language, which is used to create World-Wide Web server pages in the HyperText Mark-up Language. Early copies of WorkShop for Java are being sent to selected customers this month, with the general release planned for mid-1996.
WorkShop 2.0 delivers up to 15 percent better performance for applications on scalable processor architecture (SPARC) processors and 30 percent to 50 percent better performance on UltraSPARC machines, according to Joe Keller, director of marketing for developer products at SunSoft.
Two key tools in WorkShop -- SPARCworks/Impact and SPARCompiler C -- have been changed so they now can automatically turn C programs into parallel programs that are able to run on high-performance multiprocessing servers.
Previously, the SunSoft products did this only with FORTRAN code.
The WorkShop tool set is available for different languages: Visual WorkShop for C++ costs US$2,995; WorkShop for C is priced at $2,195; and Performance WorkShop for FORTRAN costs $4,495. There are also versions for Ada and FORTRAN 77. All are available now.
&SunSoft: (800) 786-7638.
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