In a move raising the bar for the latest innovation in faster computing, ASPEED Software successfully demonstrated significant performance enhancements for one of Intel’s newest multi-core processing chips. In benchmarking tests, its application-additive technology, ACCELLERANT reduced response times by more than 8X and increased overall capacity, without changing the application’s underlying logic.

These benchmarks coincide with Intel’s release of its new quad-core microprocessors, which offer far superior economies, computing horsepower and energy efficiency over single core microprocessors. To demonstrate ease of adoption and high scalability, ASPEED conducted several comprehensive runs of a 1,000 option and 10,000 option AMBook application – a commonality among Wall Street financial organizations – on the new quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5300 processor series, previously code named Clovertown.

When integrating ACCELLERANT, each AMBook application received consistent performance upgrades, over single-thread applications running in comparable multi-core environments:

• A 96 percent runtime reduction in a 1,000 option AMBook run, using a GCC compiler, compared with a similar run on the Irwindale Dual Processor • These results are seamlessly scalable. For example, using a 10,000 option AMBook under the same premises, results showed a 97 percent run time reduction • 82 percent elapsed time reduction, using a GCC compiler, over a single-thread application running on the same GCC compiler. Running the benchmark using the Intel Compiler provided an additional 17 percent elapsed reduction over the GCC run, an overall 95 percent improvement over expected quad-core processing levels

“Quad-core processing takes computing performance, power and innovation to new heights – as clearly demonstrated when application run times were reduced from four hours on the processor code named Irwindale to just six minutes on the quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5300 processor using ACCELLERANT,” said Kurt Ziegler, executive vice president for ASPEED Software. “We’re happy to help open the floodgates to quad-core adoption, giving organizations a clear path to achieving a new level of speed and analysis.

Going the Extra Mile – While Retaining Full Benefit Capabilities Quad-core processing offers the capacity for more fine-grained analysis and heavyweight processes, at lower operating costs. Expanded bandwidth opens the floodgates for more algorithmic-intense applications to leverage these processing environments on supercomputers, servers, desktops and laptops, constructing deeper levels of computations and decision-making.

To optimally leverage the full speed and performance benefits of these environments, most organizations parallelize single-thread applications, embracing new programming techniques such as multi-processing compliers to use each core simultaneously. To complement this approach and potentially speed the benefits of the quad-core processor platforms, ACCELLERANT offers the only solution to optimally exploit multi-core environments without undergoing intensive application re-writes, ensuring full underlying algorithmic integrity and performance.

"With great performance and energy efficiency we’re excited by the capability our new Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5300 series and Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme quad-core processor brings to financial, pharmaceutical, energy and other compute intensive applications," said Elliot Garbus, general manager of Intel’s Developer Relations Division. "The quad-core platforms provide the performance to create new high-end business applications, opening the door for faster, more informed decision-making. Intel is working closely with vendors like ASPEED to maximize performance on Intel architectures."

The Latest in Long Line of HPC Milestones The quad-core benchmark runs follow similar ACCELLERANT deployments within the most innovative high performance computing environments, opening the doors for organizations to optimally exploit multi-core, grid, cluster and other massively parallel distributed computing environments.

In ASPEED’s prior benchmark, ACCELLERANT produced a 96 percent AMBook runtime reduction and 6-fold performance improvement when running on Intel’s Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® 5100 series, previously code named Woodcrest