AMD Developer Inside Track scored an exclusive interview with Ian Pratt, Chairman of Xen and Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix. He tells us how Xen got started, where it is going and how developers can help shape virtualization. We also spoke with AMD’s Tom Woller, Principal MTS Software Engineer and Rodney Schmidt, Principal MTS Software Engineer, who discussed why it is important to have AMD engineers working directly with Xen and what new AMD virtualization features we have in our processors.

AMD has a long-standing track record of collaboration with open software development communities. Do you know which open source projects AMD has a hand in? Visit the new Open Source Technology Zone to learn about the major initiatives to which AMD contributes code.

Did you download the x86 Open64 Compiler Suite?  We would appreciate a few minutes of your time to complete a short survey to help us improve the x86 Open64 compiler. Your input is valuable, and we welcome your feedback. We will share the results in our blog after the survey closes.  The survey is open now and closes on June 7, 2010.

This latest update of the ATI Stream SDK brings additional performance-enhancing features, increases ease-of-programming, and expands hardware support.  New features include:

• Support for OpenCL / OpenGL® interoperability
• Support for OpenCL byte addressable stores
• Support for OpenCL images
• Integration of Stream KernelAnalyzer 1.5 installer
• Support for next-generation ATI FirePro™ professional graphics cards
• and more

OpenCL™ unlocks the performance capabilities of today's parallel processors, although, as with any other programming environment, achieving high performance requires careful attention to how the code is mapped to the hardware platform and executed.  This article discusses performance optimizations for AMD GPUs and CPUs using as a case study a simple, yet widely used computationally intensive kernel: Diagonal Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication.  At the end of our journey, we'll have a high-performance kernel for both the AMD Radeon™ HD 5870 GPU, as well as the AMD Phenom™ II X4 965 CPU.
OpenCL™ and the OpenCL™ logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

This article looks at the effect of enabling the attachment of a debugger on Java application performance, specifically examining a piece of the Java Platform Debugger Architecture called the JDWP agent. We will see how this agent may cause unexpected negative effects on performance on some Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), even when we are not actually debugging. We will then show how we applied some changes to improve the performance of the Hotspot JVM in the OpenJDK when it is started with debugging enabled but the debugger has not yet attached.

• HPC Advisory Council Workshop
  May 30:  Hamburg, Germany
• International SuperComputing
  May 31 – June 3:  Hamburg, Germany
• VMWorld
  August 30 – September 2: San Francisco, CA