Traditionally, the way to improve an application's performance was to throw hardware, mainly CPU at it and hope it worked. In the Grid x86_64 space, this has been the rule for the past 10 years.
But what now: Blade CPU stop at around 3.0/3.2Ghz, and quad core clock speed is likely to be slower, 1.7/2.0Ghz? The traditional CPU route is suddenly running out of road.
Options?
1. Compiler optimization: Use smarter compiler options which take single-threaded applications and 'fake' multi-threading on certain CPUs.
2. Conserve space by replacing all single and dual codde blades with quad cores.
3. Look at application re-design. Find threads which consume a whole CPU when called and optimise them.
Consider this: the blades bought 3 or 4 years ago (single or early dual core) waste too much space in the data centre, and need refreshing with newer quad core blades.
The business will have to pay a heavy price for such early investment, and should ask the question: why do we always have to buy more hardware every year in such volume? Why not look at how the application is written, and tune the code to run on the right processor.
regards
pos
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