InfoQ Homepage Performance & Scalability Content on InfoQ
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Percolator: a System for Incrementally Processing Updates to a Large Data Set
Google's Daniel Peng and Frank Dabek published a paper on "Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications” explaining that databases do not meet the storage or throughput requirements for Google's indexing system which stores tens of petabytes of data and processes billions of updates per day on thousands of machines.
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Google WebP - Creating Smaller Images for Faster Pages
Google wants to shrink images transferred over the Internet by proposing a new lossy format called WebP. They claim they have achieved 39% reduction in image byte size leading to speedier page load.
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Concurrency Revolution From a Hardware Perspective
Brian Goetz and Cliff Click spoke at JavaOne conference last week about concurrency revolution from a hardware perspective. They said CPU designers will focus on parallelism in the future for increasing throughput of the systems. They also discussed some point solutions like Thread Pools, Fork/Join, Map/Reduce and Actors to achieve the concurrency in applications.
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Aparapi: New, “Pure Java” API for Executing Arbitrary Compute Tasks on GPUs Unveiled at JavaOne
InfoQ catches up with Gary Frost from AMD who unveiled an alpha release of Aparapi, an API that allows programmers to write logic in Java to be executed on a GPU. GPUs are the massively parallel hardware acceleration chips originally installed in PCs to boost graphics rendering performance but that are now pushed to other kinds of compute-intensive tasks that have nothing to do with graphics.
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Choosing Between Private Clouds with Oracle Exalogic and Deploying Oracle Apps on Amazon EC2
Oracle has created the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a private cloud appliance for Oracle, Java and non-Java applications, and Amazon has announced support for many Oracle products.
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Microsoft Has Released Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite is the latest HPC solution from Microsoft in the technical computing initiative called Modeling the World. Some of the new features include: workstations clusters, accessing the cloud, using SOA, services for Excel, and GPU support.
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Terracotta's BigMemory Aiming to Eliminate Garbage Collection for Java Caches
Terracotta's BigMemory for Enterprise Ehcache product aims to by-pass Garbage Collection for objects held in the cache. InfoQ spoke to Amit Pandey, Chief Executive Officer at Terracotta, to find out more about the product.
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JavaOne Preview: Java Functional Programming in an Interview with GridGain CEO Nikita Ivanov
This month GridGain CEO Nikita Ivanov will be speaking about functional programming at JavaOne in San Francisco. With its 3.0 release, GridGain added a more functional feel to its product by reworking the APIs. InfoQ contacted Mr. Ivanov to get the deeper story about his company's experiences with functional programming.
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Designing a Web Application with Scalability in Mind
Max Indelicato, a Software Development Director and former Chief Software Architect, has written a post on how to design a web application for scalability. He suggests choosing the right deploying and storage solution, a scalable data storage and schema, and using abstraction layers.
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MongoDB 1.6 Adds Sharding and Replica Sets
MongoDB 1.6 is a major release addressing the scaling-out issue through sharding and adding replica sets for automatic failover and recovery.
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LinkedIn's Data Infrastructure
Jay Kreps of LinkedIn presented some informative details of how they process data at the recent Hadoop Summit. Kreps described how LinkedIn crunches 120 billion relationships per day and blends large scale data computation with high volume, low latency site serving.
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Measuring and Comparing the Performance of 5 Cloud Platforms
Bitcurrent and Webmetrics have run a number of tests for a month on 5 different cloud platforms - Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, and Terremark -, attempting to measure the performance of each platform. One of their conclusions is that each platform works better for different application types.
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BigPipe at Facebook: Optimizing Page Load Time
Changhao Jiang, Research Scientist at Facebook, describes a technique, called BigPipe, that contributed to making the Facebook site, "twice as fast." BigPipe is one of several innovations, a "secret weapon," used to achieve the reported performance gains. Another innovation mentioned is architectural in nature, the structuring of Web pages as "pagelets."
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Facebook on Hadoop, Hive, HBase, and A/B Testing
The Hadoop Summit of 2010 included presentations from a number of large scale users of Hadoop and related technologies. Notably, Facebook presented a keynote and details information about their use of Hive for analytics. Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's VP of Engineering delivered a keynote describing the scale of their data processing with Hadoop.
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Yahoo! Updates from Hadoop Summit 2010
The Hadoop Summit of 2010 started off with a vuvuzela blast from Blake Irving, Chief Product Officer for Yahoo. Yahoo delivered keynote addresses that outlined the scale of their use, technical directions for their contributions, and architectural patterns in how they apply the technology.