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ASPEED Makes Fast, Faster: Increases Effective Capacity of Intel Woodcrest; ACCELLERANT Boosts Performance Gains By Intel Woodcrest and Complier By 50 Percent in AMBook Application Benchmark

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 August 2006, 12:00 CDT

ASPEED Software announced impressive application performance improvements when benchmarking Intel's new Woodcrest chip in a 2.66GHz Dual Core Dual Processor. The results demonstrate the ability of ASPEED's ACCELLERANT to enable an application to benefit from advanced hardware configurations without the need to rewrite or restructure the application.

By the numbers:

-- 63 percent AMBook runtime reduction when running single-thread C++ compiled with the GCC compiler program when compared with the run on an Intel(R) Xeon Single Core Irwindale 3.6GHz Dual Processor.

-- 74 percent reduction when running the same single thread application with the Intel compiler, without any additional tuning.

-- 96 percent reduction in elapsed time, when running with ACCELLERANT to exploit the dual core and dual processors, essentially providing a 6-fold performance improvement over a single-thread run or 50 percent greater capacity than the anticipated 4 times faster given that only 4 cores were available to the benchmark.

"The Xeon Woodcrest performance was awesome when compared with the Xeon dual processor Irwindale and dual processor dual core Paxville configurations in the benchmark. And, the significant improvement when using the Intel compiler was an unanticipated positive surprise," said Kurt Ziegler, ASPEED's executive vice president. "We were delighted to see that ASPEED's ACCELLERANT enabled the dual core dual processors to be fully exploited to super linear parallelization."

ACCELLERANT uniquely virtualizes applications to exploit multiple cores, CPUs and distributed systems such as those running in a cluster or on a grid without any tuning to ensure predictable and scaleable capacity. ASPEED, which markets to multiple verticals, uses the AMBook (American Options Portfolio of options) application as representative of a typical Wall Street run to price a portfolio of options using Monte Carlo-based analysis. The benchmarks include varying the number of options from 1,000 to 10,000 and altering the wait times (I/Os) to characterize no I/Os and moderate I/Os. Unlike hardware benchmarks, these workloads are calibrated to reflect the impact on actual applications rather than specific hardware capabilities such as calculations or I/Os etc.

"Woodcrest, Intel's most advanced dual-core Xeon processor, significantly expands the computation power available to traders, quantitative analysts, drug developers and researchers. The new processor microarchitecture significantly improves the cost to solution ratio while empowering the analyst to do computations that were not easily achieved with earlier solutions," said Richard Wirt, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group. "Intel is working closely with vendors like ASPEED and their ISV partners to ensure the maximum performance afforded by the Intel multi-core architecture is available to all customers. This work results in applications that can scale into clusters and be consolidated on more powerful Intel systems as they become available."

Powering the Most Powerful

The Woodcrest benchmark is the latest in a series of ACCELLERANT deployments using multi-core, multi-processors, clusters and grids, each demonstrating the performance benefits, scalability and configuration optimization. ASPEED offers an ACCELLERANT SDK that supports C, C++, C#, Java, VB.NET, EXCEL/VBA, MS Access/VBA, and FORTRAN.

ACCELLERANT is regularly deployed by leading organizations within the financial, investment, pharmaceutical, energy, government and manufacturing industries to optimize application performance and speed analysis within advanced grid, cluster, multi-core and other high-performance computing environments.

About ASPEED Software

ASPEED Software Corporation is a privately held, venture-funded software company based in the heart of New York City with development centers in New York and London.

ASPEED's value proposition is to enable clients with computationally intensive applications to significantly reduce response times and improves precision. ASPEED's ACCELLERANT software enables its users to quickly adapt their existing applications to use less expensive and newer hardware technologies in multi-processor, cluster and grid configurations. ACCELLERANT's algorithm-aware API enables the distribution of applications thought by many as "undistributable," improving competitiveness, productivity and accuracy of the analysis and to participate in company cluster and grid activity. For more information, please visit www.aspeed.com

Source: Business Wire

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