Application developers, architects share perspectives on critical issues as industry shifts to parallel computing

BOULDER, Colo., Nov. 3 -- Rogue Wave Software, Inc., the leader in enterprise class C++ components and infrastructure, today announced results of a global survey of nearly 700 software developers and IT architects to gauge their organizations' attitudes towards and understand their plans to begin migrating legacy applications to multicore hardware. As the enterprise IT sector hits performance thresholds with single-core servers, devising a resource-efficient strategy is paramount. The survey was designed to better understand the challenges they are facing in this process and the strategies they are employing to address those issues.

According to the research:

The shift to multicore is imminent:

• 52 percent said that addressing the multicore issue is either a top priority or an important issue within their organization.
• 63 percent are either considering moving in the next 12 months or have moved at least a portion of their existing C++ apps to multicore hardware; 43 percent said that a number of those were mission critical apps.
• More than half (55 percent) said that they have a large portion, most or all of their production servers on multicore.

Performance requirements are the primary driver for the flight to multicore servers:

• 58 percent said that an increase in performance has been the reason behind their organizations shifting existing applications to multicore hardware.
• 92 percent said that their business applications have high performance requirements; of those that have high performance apps, 69 percent said that their business applications have requirements to support high throughput.
• 82 percent said that performance requirements for their organizations' apps are on the rise.
• Of those that said performance requirements are increasing, nearly 40 percent said that increase in data volumes are growing.

Several of the respondents noted that achieving high performance cost efficiently was a critical success factor:

• "Our applications are typically heavily multi-threaded. Multicore servers offer more parallelism without the high cost of higher end hardware (with many CPUs).
• For one particular organization "Applying complex mathematical model calculations to large portfolios is a known performance hog for capital markets."
• "Better utilization of multicore servers provides direct benefits in the operation costs of our services."
• "It looks like at some point we won't be able to purchase (single)-core chips. So, (1) if we have the processing horsepower, we should be leveraging it, and (2) there is risk that as there are more cores per chip that the per core clock rate will decrease and (single)-core apps will actually run slower, which we cannot tolerate."

There are varying strategies in addressing the multicore dilemma:

• 55 percent said that they would either rely on in-house development teams for re-configuration, or re-write/re-architect existing applications to run in parallel or a combination of both.
• 60 percent said they would rely on vendors for either tools or platforms to address the multicore issue or a combination of both.
• 60 percent said they would rely on tools to address multi-threading, parallelism and thread execution improvements.

"Multicore and many-core hardware is offering huge increases in processing power that can greatly reduce costs while increasing application throughput," said Patrick Leonard, vice president of engineering and product strategy at Rogue Wave Software. "Many existing enterprise apps are not able to take full advantage of the benefits multicore hardware provides, which creates the 'multicore dilemma.' Fortunately, tools are available to make this much easier than it has been in the past. Rather than rewriting applications to be multi-threaded, tools such as Rogue Wave Hydra can use service parallelism to reduce the initial effort of moving to multicore and make ongoing changes to the parallel model configurable, rather than hard-coded."

About Rogue Wave Hydra

The Rogue Wave Hydra Suite is a suite of products for developing and deploying high performance business applications. The Hydra Suite consists of HydraEnterprise, HydraExpress, and HydraSDO working together to deliver the agility and flexibility benefits a service oriented architecture (SOA) inherently provides, without sacrificing the high performance businesses require. The Rogue Wave Hydra Suite products can work standalone or integrated together in an efficient service framework.

About Rogue Wave Software

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.

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Source: Rogue Wave Software, Inc.