Multi-core and Parallelization

In contrast to the hardware development until the early 2000 years, todays processing power does no longer scale in terms of processing speed, but degree of parallelism. Today, modern system architectures provide server boards with up to eight separate CPUs where each CPU has up to twelve separate cores. This tremendous amount of processing power should be exploited as much as possible to achieve the highest possible throughout for transactional and analytical applications. For modern enterprise applications it becomes imperative to reduce the amount of sequential work and develop the application in a way that work can be easily parallelized.

Parallelization can be achieved at a number of levels in the application stack of enterprise systems – from within the application running on an application server to query execution in the database system. As an example of application-level parallelism, assume the following: Incoming queries need to be processed by EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) repositories in parallel to meet response time thresholds. Processing multiple queries can be handled by multi-threaded applications, i.e. the application does not stall when dealing with more than one query. Threads are a software abstraction that needs to be mapped to physically available hardware resources. A CPU core can be considered as single worker on a construction area. If it is possible to map each query to a single core, the system’s response time is optimal. Query processing also involves data processing, i.e. the database needs to be queried in parallel, too. If the database is able to distribute the workload across multiple cores a single system works optimal. If the workload exceeds physical capacities of a single system, multiple servers or blades need to be involved for work distribution to achieve optimal processing behavior. From the database perspective, partitioning datasets supports parallelization since multiple cores across servers can be involved for data processing.

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