Search

Buy Now

My Account

Software Pipelines

The Key to High-Performance through Intelligent Parallel Processing

The Performance Demand

In today's information-based economy, application software performance often means the difference between success and failure. Many enterprises are finding that not only is faster performance required to stay abreast of the competition, but new and growing business demands are requiring an order of magnitude increase in performance.

The Free Ride is Over

Historically, application developers could rely on significant advances in computing technology (primarily improvements in CPU performance) to compensate for the lack of software efficiency and other performance bottlenecks. However, the reality today is much different. Current microprocessor technology has hit a plateau due to physical factors such as power consumption, heat generation, and quantum mechanics. Therefore, for the next several years, CPU vendors are relying on multi-core designs for delivering increased horsepower. Due to this reality, the clock speed of a single CPU will not increase to the degree of past curves. For software to take advantage of the multi-CPU nature of the new chips, parallel processing will be required.

The Solution: Software Pipelines

What is needed is a new, simpler way to implement parallel computing for business organizations, that:

• Is specifically designed to address the wide variety of business application needs
• Can provide ultimate scalability for business applications while maintaining critical business requirements
• Can be easily implemented by the professional developer within business IT organizations

The solution lies in Software Pipelines, which provides a highly-scalable, flexible paradigm for implementing parallel processing.

Software Pipelines

The Software Pipelines Paradigm

Software Pipelines represent an architectural approach, specifically designed for business applications, that:

• Supports virtually unlimited peer-to-peer scalability
• Provides an easy method to control the exact distribution and parallel execution of various tasks, or components of a business process, within a single server or across a multitude of servers
• Handles a high volume stream of transactions, both large and small, ideal for mixed-workload business application processing
• Offers the ability to scale through parallel processing while still guaranteeing order of processing - a key business requirement in many mission-critical applications

In essence, the software pipelines paradigm creates multiple "pipelines", each used to process a portion of a business application process.

Ultimately, Software Pipelines offers a solution to meet the ever-growing performance demand, providing the professional developer with the framework needed to achieve highly-scalable business applications, while maintaining critical transaction and integrity requirements.

Find out more! | Read the Software Pipelines Overview white paper