Chip vendors such as AMD, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems have transformed the server landscape with their introductions of 2, 4, and 8-core processors. This means that commodity SMP servers with 32 and 48 cores are now available and core counts will continue to rise. The hardware is now delivering unprecedented performance, but that has not always translated into faster software.
When previous generations of processors simply increased the clock speed to deliver greater performance, software just went faster without changing the application. Unfortunately software is typically not designed to take advantage of these multicore processors and is, therefore, under-delivering on performance.
Software organizations are now faced with the daunting task of “parallelizing” their applications. These projects are large, complex, error-prone, and require a set of unique and highly valued skills.
Fortunately, leveraging Pervasive DataRush allows an organization’s current development team to quickly make their data-intensive applications multicore-aware and leverage the elusive performance of multicore processors.