Federally Funded R&D Center Uses Rogue Wave Concurrency Solution to Deliver Economical, High Performance Application Architecture

BOULDER, CO--(Marketwire - March 25, 2008) - Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) are no strangers to using advanced technology to solve extended business problems. FFRDCs are unique independent nonprofit entities sponsored and funded by the U.S. government to solve specific long-term, complex technical problems. By teaming with Rogue Wave Software, Inc., the leader in enterprise class C++ components and infrastructure, one FFRDC recently tackled a challenging computing issue in a way that turned the notion of high performance computing on its ear.

Working with Rogue Wave, the FFRDC determined that functionality that typically required a large mainframe environment due to the complexities of the processes could now be accomplished with a commodity server environment with the right software. The challenge with moving from the mainframe to a network of smaller, less expensive hardware is that the smaller servers get much of their computing power from "multi-core" chips, which the software was not architected to leverage. Rogue Wave HydraSCA was used to solve this "Multi-core Dilemma" so that the FFRDC could make the move.

"Our independent R&D program is always exploring new technologies -- and new uses of existing technologies -- to solve our sponsors' problems today and in the future," said a representative from the FFRDC. "We build and maintain complex systems to solve complex problems, and we continually test the performance ceiling of technology."

More specifically, the U.S. government needed to move an existing algorithmic application to a new architecture that could support a massive computational workload representing a large number of observations that included differential corrections. In fact, the specified growth requirement for transactions per second for this project exceeded the current world record for centralized database input/output. As a result, the FFRDC needed to address millions of independent processes, concurrently, with maximum throughput and scalability, by leveraging newer multi-core hardware which can readily divide the problem across processors to achieve quicker results.

"For this project, we quickly recognized that centralized data stores cause too many bottlenecks to address our performance requirements, and rewriting all of the algorithms for concurrency was not efficient," added the FFRDC representative. "A system like this is usually run on a large server farm and would cost millions, but with the advancements in concurrency we believed we could scale it using a commodity hardware cluster if we had the right software tools in place."

Using Rogue Wave's HydraSCA, the combined commercial and government team was able to migrate away from a large and expensive mainframe environment to a commodity hardware cluster running multi-core processors. As a result, the team has deployed a highly scalable solution that has greatly reduced the amount of work its developers need to perform, allowing them to concentrate more on enhancing the functionality.

However, considering the size, scale and speed of the solution, the most significant benefit may be the cost to build and maintain it. "The entire solution, including hardware and software, was a tenth the cost of running it on the old mainframe system for just one year, and the old system struggled to keep up with the load," said the FFRDC rep.

A senior U.S. government team member added, "We are extremely impressed by the flexibility and scalability that HydraSCA delivered. The integration has been seamless and we have been able to take full advantage of the multi-core hardware platforms without requiring a complete re-write to the underlying code."

"This project is a milestone in achieving price/performance advancements. But it also demonstrates the potential in migrating existing solutions to a multi-core architecture," said Tom Gaunt, senior vice president worldwide sales and marketing at Rogue Wave. "Any dynamic enterprise facing increased performance requirements can extend the value of their existing C+ + investments if they use the right concurrency solution."

Rogue Wave's HydraSCA is the first commercially available run-time that supports the SCA specification, enabling a repeatable model for service enablement in high-performance environments. HydraSCA supports SCA components implemented in C++, Java, and BPEL. Rogue Wave also offers the most complete platform support across the IT spectrum allowing applications to be incorporated into SOA, legacy, and other environments.

About the Rogue Wave Hydra Suite

The Rogue Wave® Hydra Suite delivers a scalable service grid for high performance business applications delivered with an SOA. The Hydra Suite consists of HydraSCA, HydraExpress, and HydraSDO™ working together in an efficient service grid designed to deliver the agility and flexibility benefits an SOA inherently provides, without sacrificing the high performance businesses require. The Rogue Wave® Hydra Suite delivers the latest Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Object (SDO) standards along with C++ Web Services based on the well-established SOAP and WSDL standards. For more information about the Rogue Wave Hydra Suite, go to http://www.roguewave.com/products/hydra/.

About Rogue Wave

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, visit www.roguewave.com.

Rogue Wave is a registered trademark of Rogue Wave Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

Contact Information: Media Relations Contact: Suzanne Miller Reidy Communications (314) 795-4225