Date Posted: June 30, 2009
Update: September 30, 2009
New version adds enhanced deadlock views and analysis session views, improved data collection for AIX/Power systems, and is more stable due to bugs fixes in all components.
Tab navigation
- 1. Is Multicore Software Development Kit for developers or for testers?
- 2. Does Multicore Software Development Kit offer building blocks or APIs set for parallel programming?
- 3. Why do the error reports vary from time to time?
- 4. Is JRE sufficient to run this tool?
- 5. Does this tool work on Sun JDK?
- 6. Are 64 bit processors supported?
- 7. Is there a difference in capability when running the performance tooling on Linux and Windows?
1. Is Multicore Software Development Kit for developers or for testers?
Both. Developers will find the tool valuable for doing detailed analysis of their application to find concurrency-related bugs and performance bottlenecks. Testers can also use the tool to check concurrency problems in software components or products.
2. Does Multicore Software Development Kit offer building blocks or APIs set for parallel programming?
No. Multicore Software Development Kit is an all-in-one toolkit for development of parallel programs on multicore platforms. It offers various useful tools to help developers and testers to find concurrency errors and locate performance bottleneck in parallel/multi-threaded programs. Amino project offers high-performance concurrent building blocks.
3. Why do the error reports vary from time to time?
The Multicore Software Development Kit has a set of dynamic, runtime analysis tools. It will analyze the code path that is actually executed. Between runs if the execution path changes because of different input data or some other environment changes, different parts of the code may get analyzed. This may cause different results between runs.
4. Is JRE sufficient to run this tool?
No, JRE is not sufficient to run Multicore Software Development Kit. You must have a JDK. Make sure that JAVA_HOME exists in the system variables, and that it is set to the location of your JDK, not JRE. For example, for Windows, C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_02 or for Linux, /opt/ibm-java-i386-60/. Ensure that for Windows %JAVA_HOME%\bin or (Linux) $JAVA_HOME/bin is in your path environment variable.
5. Does this tool work on Sun JDK?
The testing and analysis tool of MSDK runs on Sun JDK, except the lock analysis tool. The performance tool requires an IBM JDK.
6. Are 64 bit processors supported?
We have tested the tooling on 64-bit Linux running on Intel and AMD processors. For Multicore SDK performance tool, the kernel needs to be patched to generate certain kernel events. Patches are available from the usual Linux support channels to upgrade the kernel and details can be provided on request.
7. Is there a difference in capability when running the performance tooling on Linux and Windows?
The Windows support is intended primarily to operate as a user interface, although Java applications can be monitored using the supplied JVMTI agent. When running under Windows, there is no equivalent of the Linux Kernel Module, thus some of the low level events, such as thread switch, and related views are not available.
