May 2008 - Posts

• Explaining our secret sauce

  We wish we had some competition. If there was some other vendor implementing dataflow, then we would not have the sole responsibility of teaching people about this approach. While there are certainly a large number of people who are familiar with the concept, most of the people we are meeting in presenting DataRush are not. When we explain and illustrate the phenomenal results (as in 3 hours to 22 seconds), often the first question is "How can this be?" My response has been to point them to the Wikipedia entry for dataflow programming. "Dataflow languages contrast with the majority of programming languages, which use the imperative programming model. In imperative programming the program is modeled as a series of operations, the data being effectively invisible. This distinction may seem minor, but the paradigm shift is fairly dramatic, and allows dataflow languages to be spread out across multicore, multiprocessor systems for free." Check it out as a good place to start! Posted May 30 2008, 12:32 PM by Pervasive DataRush - Unleash the Power of Multicore

• The tubas are blaring and the drums are pounding.

  I just returned from our first presentation of DataRush to potential partners, SIs, and developers. While we have exhibited at a bunch of shows like JavaOne, Innotech, and the HP Global Showcase, and while we have briefed a bunch of smart press people and analysts, this was our first time with this type of audience. Overall, we were very pleased at the interest and response to our story. The IT environment is looking for practical solutions to utilizing the multicore power that is flooding into the market, and these people see the tremendous opportunity inherent in platform transitions. Today's Fry's ad shows a Gateway quad-core for $560. Charles DeGaulle said that to be successful, one needs to "find a parade and get in front of it", and this parade is already marching down the street. Posted May 30 2008, 12:12 PM by Pervasive DataRush - Unleash the Power of Multicore

• Low-Latency Technology Outpacing Programmers’ Capabilities

  "Again and again, executives said that finding enough programmers who are able to write "parallel" code -- programs that efficiently divide workloads across distributed processors -- is almost impossible. As Wall Street firms rely on multicore processing and even distributed computing to handle the ever-growing number of trade-related messages that are sensitive to any increase in data latency, the divergence between the capabilities of the technology and the capabilities of the programmers is becoming painfully evident.",/i> Posted May 30 2008, 11:45 AM by Pervasive DataRush - Unleash the Power of Multicore

• The Lawnmower Law

  This article is a simple illustrative introduction to Amdahl's Law. "Indeed, just as with parallel processors, there is a point of diminishing return. Adding the first 10 riding mowers reduced the time by 36 minutes. Adding another 30 only saved me 4 minutes. Adding 100 mowers makes little sense since I’ll never get below 20 minutes. (Although I would love to see such a lawn mowing demolition derby — in my neighbors yard of course.)" Posted May 21 2008, 12:10 PM by Pervasive DataRush - Unleash the Power of Multicore

• Intel Itanium to go quad-core in early 2009

  I didn't know there was an Itanium Solutions Alliance, but this article includes the road map for Intel's continued commitment to Itanium, notably, going to a single-die quadcore. I noticed a display for the Itanium JVM in the Intel booth at JavaOne, and it is also mentioned in the article, but it doesn't specify the OS. We are looking forward to testing on it as soon as we can. As you can see here, we achieved great results in our scalability tests on the 32-core HP Integrity server running the HP-UX JVM, developed by HP. These unit growth numbers are very impressive as well:"...On another front, the Itanium Solutions Alliance announced that worldwide annual Itanium-based factory system revenue and system volume continued to grow in 2007, with a year-over-year increase of 30.8 and 36.3 percent, respectively. The Asia-Pacific region led the way, with year-over-year growth in factory system revenue and system volume of 61 percent and 45 percent, respectively." Posted May 19 2008, 09:13 AM by Pervasive DataRush - Unleash the Power of Multicore

• Back from JavaOne

  We all made it back without anyone getting the norovirus, and it was a really great show for us. We were excited to be invited to show DataRush in the AMD booth and to participate in their keynote talk. It is clear that lots of developers, architects, and project managers are feeling the pain of parallel programming, and are realizing that this challenge is real, is not going to go away, and that they have to find alternative approaches. I was too busy to walk the floor, but it was fun for me to talk to the Tommy II autonomous vehicle team and hear firsthand about the DARPA challenge. What caught your eye? Posted May 12 2008, 03:14 PM by Pervasive DataRush - Unleash the Power of Multicore