Zircon Computing Declares Distributed Networking Results For Multicore AMD Opteron

Zircon Computing, LLC, a Wayne, New Jersey based provider of high performance grid and cloud computing solutions for organizations of all sizes, has declared the results of project that it had recently completed in collaboration with AMD, a provider of enhanced hardware and software solutions. The project aimed at optimizing the performance of a software solution developed recently by Zircon on the multi-core AMD (News - Alert) Opteron platform for embedded systems. It also measured the solution’s performance on the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarking Consortium or ‘EEMBC’ (News - Alert) Networking Suite 2.0. Apart from providing its platform-independent solutions to enterprise clients in a direct manner, Zircon also offers them through a wide network of certified partners.

“As part of Zircon’s latest software release, version 3.3, Zircon delivered enhanced support for task and data parallelism, thereby reducing the programming effort needed to parallelize application business logic,” commented Alexander Mintz, chief executive officer at Zircon Computing, LLC. “We also leveraged the AMD Opteron platform as a powerful environment for delivering elastic applications that can be distributed easily and flexibly on a single multi-core machine up to a cluster or a cloud platform.”

The Zircon team leveraged the Pipeline pattern to maintain the request object’s lifecycle and update it based on results of its execution on co-located or remote worker threads; with an aim to scale up the EEMBC Networking Suite. It is helpful in emulating a relatively big number of TCP/IP sessions within a single process simultaneously. During the project, the Data Parallelism pattern was applied to the rest of the Networking Suite. It allowed the team to process ranges of indices from data array and reduced integration efforts. Additionally, it facilitated parallelization of a legacy code to provide almost linear scalability increases on multi-core machines.

“Zircon is an emerging leader in advancing flexible, cost-effective distributed and parallel computing software to help accelerate applications in multi-core systems and we have shared customers who demand the highest levels of networking performance,” said Buddy Broeker, director, Embedded Solutions, AMD. “The results of the EEMBC Networking Suite 2.0 can offer clear analysis of the benefits that Zircon and AMD bring to networking and router solutions.”

Earlier this month, Zircon Computing announced the results of two projects in which Zircon collaborated with SGI on an initiative to optimize the performance of two applications on the SGI Altix UV 1000 platform comprising 512 cores, 1,024 threads, and 4 TB of memory.