Developer Innovation Feature Story

Solving Scalability and Poor Response Time Problems

• Pauseless Garbage Collection
  The Azul Compute Appliance includes hardware-assisted pauseless garbage collection. Garbage collection (GC) is necessary to consolidate memory that becomes fragmented over time, causing application pauses that create unacceptable delays in large applications. Using a special hardware assisted algorithm, Azul Compute Appliances offer parallel concurrent garbage collection with a deterministic algorithm. This gives enterprise applications access to a 64-bit memory heap as large as 96GB, free from garbage collection pauses.
  
• Memory Efficient
  The rule of thumb with traditional GC is to allocate 4-5 times the live memory set in oreder to maintain the desired service levels. With an Azul Compute Appliance, the required heap size can be as little as only 2 times the live memory for an equivalent service level agreement (SLA.)
  
• Optimistic Thread Concurrency
  Although applications may be multi-threaded, keeping the threads from interfering with each other is a problem that grows in complexity as the number of threads increase. This is especially true when many threads need to access memory. Access to such memory locations is usually serialized via memory locks in order to preserve the correct order in which threads access them. This locking behavior can create unnecessary contention for shared objects in memory and typically has a dramatic impact on parallel performance with unacceptable delays in large applications. To address this problem, Azul Systems has introduced Optimistic Thread Concurrency (OTC), a capability that lets threads speculate through lock requests, and then monitors and protects against all possible memory contentions, with no overhead.

Deployments In Less Time

Network attached processing also improves the time to market for new Java-based applications and services by 40% or more, by providing a consistent develop-test-deployment infrastructure, and remove the need for capacity planning at the individual application level. These advantages eliminate the lengthy development stage of optimizing an application configuration to the constraints of the capacity provided. For many developers, this tuning stage takes as much or more time as building the application in the first place.

Music to Your Ears

Azul Compute Appliances were designed from the chip up to provide the ideal processing architecture for today's highly multithreaded and parallel nature of virtual machine workloads. In fact, this is the industry's first server architecture with specific hardware capabilities optimized for the execution of virtual machine-based applications. With network attached processing, Java applications don't just run, they SING! The last ten years have seen massive adoption of the Java platform. Enterprises have benefited from the truly innovative solutions the envrionemnt has brought about. With network attached processing, the best is yet to come!