SCIENCE

Zircon Computing has announced the results of a recently completed project in which Zircon and AMD collaborated on a key initiative to optimize the performance of Zircon's latest software release on the multicore AMD Opteron platform for embedded systems and measure that performance on the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarking Consortium (EEMBC) Networking Suite 2.0.

"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," said Alexander Mintz, CEO of Zircon Computing, LLC. He adds "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 multicore machine up to a cluster or a cloud platform."

"To scale up the EEMBC Networking Suite the Zircon team used the Pipeline pattern to maintain the request object's lifecycle and update it based on results of its execution on colocated or remote worker threads. Thousands of TCP/IP sessions can thus be emulated in the scope of a single process concurrently on a pool of co-located worker threads, yielding a highly efficient and scalable software router. The Data Parallelism pattern was applied to the rest of the Networking Suite to process ranges of indices from data array, thereby minimizing integration efforts and facilitate parallelization of a legacy (non-thread safe) code, yielding near-linear scalability increases on multicore machines," says Mintz.

"Zircon is an emerging leader in advancing flexible, cost-effective distributed and parallel computing software to help accelerate applications in multicore 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."