Industry Experts Share Lessons From the Multi-Core Front

BOULDER, CO--(Marketwire - September 30, 2008) - Software developers know that the days of single-processor servers are long dead, but many still aren't convinced their legacy applications have a future in a multi-core world. To date, only technology companies with the largest in-house IT organizations such as Google and Amazon.com have consistently been able to achieve higher performance from multi-core architectures running on commodity hardware. However, with computing loads increasing across all industries, more conventional companies will be faced with the need to migrate even though they lack the expertise, resources or budget to tackle the problem the way the largest IT teams have.

The good news is the migration to multi-core processors can provide companies with growing high performance needs a cost-effective means to gain greater computing capacity and application throughput. In fact, IDC expects the worldwide market for high performance computing will grow to $15 billion by 2011. So what's the problem? It's widely known that many existing business applications are not multi-threaded and can't take full advantage of multi-core architectures. Just adding more cores will not materially impact performance in single-threaded applications, and they may even run slower. Even some newer applications written for multi-threading were designed for only a relatively small number of threads; they too may also need retooling as the number of cores increases over the next few years.

"An abundance of processor cores is causing software developers to change their programming assumptions. To maximize the benefits of today's technology and more dense future computing platforms, IT teams need a long term solution to enable their applications run in parallel," said James Reinders, Director Software Development Products, Intel Corporation. "The keys for migrating applications are using the right tools that can give performance today and tomorrow and tools that interoperate with other solutions such as Intel compilers and libraries. This means avoiding quick fixes and closed solutions. The promise of a more dynamic computing experience is here for companies who thought they could never afford it or who have found they can take advantage of high performance systems."

For example, the MITRE Corporation, one of the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC), working with the U.S. Air Force prototyped the move of a highly complex application from a large mainframe environment to a multi-core environment. But as many companies have already found, the legacy software was not architected to leverage the new hardware. In response, MITRE's Prototype used software from Rogue Wave Software with an Intel® Xeon® processor-based server environment to successfully migrate the legacy application.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) are also looking to make the jump without having to rewrite their entire code base as well as to help existing customers transition to multi-core. A leading provider of financial crime management and compliance solutions needed to transition from its batch-oriented product offering to real-time fraud detection, significantly increasing transaction volume. Seeing the opportunity offered by the shift in hardware architectures, the ISV used Rogue Wave solutions to optimize the multi-core platforms -- without requiring a complete re-write and accelerating the time-to-market for its next generation product.

"Traditional approaches to adapt existing applications for multi-core architectures are often either too complex or cost prohibitive," said Massimo Pezzini, Vice President and Fellow, Gartner. "Existing technologies such as application servers and clustering solutions help for some business applications, but many will need to be rewritten to leverage multi-core hardware through support for concurrent processing. But technologies are emerging to facilitate this process by abstracting the complexity of multi-threading away."

New tools from experienced providers like Rogue Wave, Intel, Sun and others can enable both legacy and service-oriented applications to run faster in multi-core environments. For example, using the complementary suites of tools from Intel and Rogue Wave Software can improve concurrency for C++-based applications running on multi-core systems. Intel Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) and Rogue Wave Hydra can be plugged into an existing application easily and can generate results fairly rapidly and can improve performance far beyond what can be achieved by fine-tuning existing code.

"Enterprises running mission critical systems on legacy platforms can't duck the decisions they'll be forced to make as they adopt more multi-core technology," said Brian Pierce, chief executive officer, Rogue Wave Software. "The good news is that companies now have proven solutions to modernize existing applications that maximize the use of multi-core architectures regardless of whether they are in legacy or service oriented environments."

About Rogue Wave

Rogue Wave Software, Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise class C++ components and infrastructure that enable organizations to build and deploy high performance applications. Only Rogue Wave provides the most complete C++ technology stack including C++ components, UI components, run-time infrastructure, and services. Today, thousands of organizations worldwide have chosen Rogue Wave. For more information go to http://www.roguewave.com.

Rogue Wave is a registered trademark of Rogue Wave Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

Contact Information: Media Relations Contact: Suzanne Miller Reidy Communications (415) 573-0710