J. Stan Cox

One of the greatest strengths of Java Platform 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers is the ability to scale solutions to meet increased performance and availability demands. The inherent clustering and failover capabilities built into products such as the IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment Edition take care of most of the dirty work; however, there are important application considerations that can't be overlooked. If an application isn't designed for cluster awareness, functional or performance issues can surface when deploying your application to a cluster. Expecting your application to run only in a single server Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is self-limiting, and with a little more upfront work, you can ensure cluster readiness, and be more confident that your application will scale when the need arises. This paper discusses design and im... (more)

Multi-Core and Massively Parallel Processors

As software developers we have enjoyed a long trend of consistent performance improvement from processor technology. In fact, for the last 20 years processor performance has consistently doubled about every two years or so. What would happen in a world where these performance improvements suddenly slowed dramatically or even stopped? Could we continue to build bigger and heavier, feature-rich software? Would it be time to pack up our compilers and go home? The truth is, single threaded performance improvement is likely to see a significant slowdown over the next one to three yea... (more)