AMD unveils open source eclipse plug-in

SUNNYVALE, USA: At EclipseCon today, AMD announced a new plug-in that provides the Eclipse community with increased performance management and monitoring of Java software code. Called “CodeSleuth,” this new plug-in delivers the functionality of AMD’s CodeAnalyst Performance Analyzer, a powerful suite of tools that analyze software performance on AMD processors, including Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.

To help ensure that the plug-in is readily available to the Java technology community and evolves with the community’s needs, AMD is making CodeSleuth open source and available as a no-charge download within the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

“AMD is extending our efforts to ensure that Java software developers and the open source software community are fully equipped to leverage the performance benefits of multi-core hardware,” said Earl Stahl, vice president of Software Development, AMD. “Java technology represents a prevalent development environment for the enterprise and CodeSleuth will help ensure that Java software developers have access to the tools and resources that are needed to take advantage of new hardware trends.”

CodeSleuth allows developers to improve upon traditional performance analysis by revealing data about how the Java software code is performing on the processor. This ensures that the developer has pertinent information available to make informed coding choices and avoid the programming pitfalls that can result in performance bottlenecks.

CodeSleuth’s integration with Eclipse’s open development platform provides Java software developers with a familiar interface for this additional functionality. CodeSleuth can also observe performance information from ‘compiled code,’ which can provide further insight for the developer.

“AMD is making a welcome contribution to the Eclipse community,” said Mike Millinkovich, director of the Eclipse Foundation. “AMD’s decision to contribute CodeSleuth to the Eclipse community allows Java software developers greater visibility into how hardware processes code and helps reduce the amount of time and effort it will take developers to troubleshoot issues. We anticipate developers will quickly and enthusiastically take advantage of the plug-in and evolve it to meet their respective needs.”

Today’s processors can provide both developers and performance engineers with valuable performance information via performance counters embedded within the processor. These performance counters can provide a developer with insight into the interactions between the processor and code.

CodeSleuth enables the developer to track the counter information from raw address locations, through the machine code emitted by Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) and back to the Java software. Once the developer is able to identify the location of the performance issues in the Java software, he or she can modify the code to improve overall application performance. Java software developers who are focused on optimizing the performance of their applications will especially benefit from CodeSleuth.