Sun Tuesday released its Studio 12 Update 1 advanced compilers and tools for Solaris, OpenSolaris and Linux.

An optimized environment for the latest multi-core x86 and Sparc-based systems, it’s supposed to simplify parallel development and heighten application performance.

Geared to C, C++ and FORTRAN developers, it consists of parallelizing compilers, powerful debuggers, advanced thread and performance analysis tools and highly tuned libraries.

Its features should help developers debug multithreaded code, isolate common thread issues and profile thread execution for performance problems.

Sun says it can reduce development time with DLight, a new visual profiling tool based on the DTrace technology in Solaris. It also supports the OpenMP 3.0 API specification, including the new tasking model.

The Studio 12 IDE has been updated and there’s a new standalone GUI debugger called dbxTool with the functionality to identify memory issues such as leaks, access errors and usage. It also adds profiling functionality for distributed MPI-based application based on a variety of MPI runtimes, including Sun’s HPC ClusterTools software.

Sun says the widgetry was tested for seven weeks by about 5,000 developers in Sun’s Express and Early Access programs. Half of them were Linux folk.

It’s free for download at http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/. The company offers support services.