Azul, Mainsoft Bring .NET Code to Compute Appliances

Published: May 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are enough similarities between Java and its eponymous virtual machines and the C# programming language and its Common Language Runtime at the heart of Microsoft's .NET environment that you would think it would be possible to run both on Azul Systems' Compute Appliances. But, the "Vega" processors that Azul created to support Java virtual machines cannot run CLRs. However, Azul can do the next best thing: Convert .NET to Java and then run it on its Compute Appliances.

This week, Azul and Mainsoft, a systems software and development tool specialist with lots of experience in converting Windows applications to run on other platforms, announced a partnership that will see the two work together to expand the reach of the Compute Appliance network-attached co-processors, which Azul announced to much fanfare in October 2004.

Back then, Azul said that the real programming environments of the future--and the ones that its co-processors were aimed at supporting wickedly efficiently--were Sun Microsystems' Java/JVM/J2EE combo and Microsoft's C#/CLR/.NET combo. Back then, I guessed that Azul would create a .NET variant of the Compute Appliance by using the Project Mono open source clone of the CLR, which would allow C# to run natively on a Vega processor. But according to Shahin Khan, vice president and chief marketing officer at Azul, the Mono software has its own variant on the virtual machine theme, and that would require Azul to create a different iteration of the Vega chip to specifically support the Mono VM. Someday, when Azul has lots of sales, it may do this--that was certainly the impression Azul was trying to give back in late 2004. But, then again, if companies can code in .NET and Java, convert the .NET code to Java, and only run Java, why should they care?

Mainsoft is obviously very happy about this approach. "This is a very good fit for us, since we take .NET code and compile it down to Java bytecodes," explained Yaacov Cohen, president and CEO at Mainsoft. "The idea is to extend the usefulness of the Compute Appliance from J2EE to .NET, and now customers can do it without changing what they code their applications in."

Khan echoes this sentiment. "Some 95 percent of companies in the world have Java or .NET in their shops, and they can now develop in both and not really care about where it is deployed," he says.

To make this work, customers have to buy MainSoft's Visual MainWin for J2EE, a snap-in for Microsoft's Visual Studio development tool. Visual MainWin for J2EE was originally created to allow applications written in Visual Basic and .NET languages like C# and running against the Windows middleware stack to be ported to any J2EE-compliant server, notably Linux, Unix, OS/400, and mainframe servers. It can also be used to move .NET code to the Azul Compute appliances, which execute Java code that is hosted on the Web application servers to which they are attached, much as a math co-processor does math for the main CPU in any computer these days. Visual MainWin for J2EE Enterprise Edition is licensed per developer and per deployed server, costing $5,000 per developer seat and $2,500 per server for a two-year license; developer support is 15 percent of the development license fee per year.

The similarities between .NET and Java also work in the favor of performance for customers who want to offload .NET workloads from their servers. In early benchmark tests, Cohen says that a fraction of an Azul Compute Appliance, which has 384 cores supporting JVMs in its largest configuration, can do the work of three Wintel servers running actual .NET code. This is the same three-to-one ratio that Azul has been telling Java shops is a good baseline for gauging the value of the co-processors. "Our hope is that the performance will be a lot better than that," explained Khan. "But, you know all about the benchmarking world, and you know that a vendor can always show one case where a customer has 300X performance improvement and then there's another where it does nothing."

The Vega chip designed by Azul and manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has 24 cores on a single die, each tuned to run a JVM. (Azul has not said what the clock speed or cache structure is on the Vega chip, nor has it said what chip process it is using to create it.) A single Compute Appliance has 16 of these 24-core Vega chips and a maximum of 256 GB of main memory, all in a single SMP image, packed into an 11U form factor.

This week, along with the Mainsoft partnership, Azul announced that it has upped the size of the memory heap for the JVMs from to 199 GB, to more than double the 96 GB of the original machines. Azul has also put out an API that will allow the makers of systems management software--such as Hewlett-Packard with OpenView, CA with Unicenter, and IBM with Tivoli--to reach into the Compute Appliance's own management software to set policies and automate its operations, just like other machines in the network. Azul has also put out a performance analyzer and monitor that will provide a core dump of data for third-party performance management and optimization tools so companies can fine tune their Java applications to squeeze the most performance out of them.

The Azul Compute appliances can hook into HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Linux servers using normal Ethernet or InfiniBand links. A fully loaded machine with 384 cores can, in theory, run the Java work of around 1,200 general purpose servers, and considering that this quarter-rack machine only consumes about 3.2 kilowatts of juice and has a price tag of only $800,000, the Compute Appliance is offering killer price/performance and very green processing. If you assume that a reasonably configured X64 server costs around $4,000, that's a five-to-one improvement in price and a three-to-one improvement in performance. These are small numbers, and that is huge in the data center these days.

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