Excerpts

We're now in the multicore era. As consumers of computing power, we've all come to expect a never-ending increase in power, and CPU manufacturers are now using multicore processors to continue that long-standing trend. If we want to take full advantage of this enormous capacity, our business applications must "do more than one thing at a time." However, traditional parallel computing methods (such as multithreading, SMP, and clustering) are either limiting or extremely difficult to implement, especially when used on top of application components that weren't originally designed for a parallel world. Software Pipelines architecture is a new architecture that specifically addresses the problem of using parallel processing in the multicore era. It is a new approach to the problem. Pipeline technology abstracts the complexities of parallel computing and makes it possible to use the power of the new CPUs for business applications. We wrote this book primarily for software architects, application developers, and application development managers who need high-performance, scalable business applications. Project managers, software quality assurance specialists, and IT operations managers will also find it useful; however, the main focus is software development. Our intention was to make the book as applicable as possible, and to provide tools that you can quickly learn and apply to your own development challenges. The book is divided into four sections, which we'll describe in this preface. Pipelines Theory The Pipelines Theory section, Chapters 1 through 5, covers the following topics: How pipelines work, including the fundamental concepts and underlying theory of Software Pipelines What pipelines can accomplish Methods for applying Software Pipelines Pipelines Patterns, including various ways to apply Software Pipelines in business application scenarios, setting the stage for the examples in later chapters As the foundation for the remainder of the book, this section is appropriate for all readers. If you're a software architect or an application developer, you should definitely study this section first. If you're reading the book from a managerial perspective, or if your interest is more general and less technical, you can focus on just this section. Pipelines Methodology The Pipelines Methodology section, Chapters 6 through 13, shows how to implement Software Pipelines by using the step-by-step Software Pipelines Optimization Cycle (SPOC). To illustrate how the methodology works, we use it to solve a business problem for a fictitious example company, the Pipelines Bank Corporation (PBCOR). In each chapter we present a new step, then show you how we used the step in our PBCOR example. This section will be of interest to all primary audiences of the book, including project managers. The PBCOR examples get into a fair amount of technical detail; therefore, application development managers might want to skip over the more complex examples. Pipelines Examples The Pipelines Examples section, Chapters 14 through 22, contains code examples based on the reference Pipelines Framework we developed for the book. We've included examples for each main Pipelines Pattern from the Pipelines Theory section. You can use these as guides for applying Software Pipelines directly to your own real-world applications. This section is for software architects and application developers, the roles directly involved in pipelines implementation. In addition, IT operations managers will find it helpful to read the configuration sections, which show how to modify the scalability of an application without modifying the actual application components. We recommend that you read the first three chapters of this section in detail. These basic chapters include Chapter 14, "Hello Software Pipelines"; Chapter 15, "Scaling Hello Software Pipelines"; and Chapter 16, "Additional Pipelines Router Configurations." After that, you might prefer to scan the more advanced examples in Chapters 17 through 22, then concentrate on the ones that most apply to your specific application scenarios. The Future of Software Pipelines In the final section we tell you about the future we envision for Software Pipelines architecture. There are plenty of greenfield areas that can be developed, and it is our hope that this section will inspire readers to help move the technology forward into the mainstream. Conventions In our examples, when we present a section of code or XML, refer to a command, or refer to a code element, we'll use a monospaced font, for example,. For names of components, such as services, clients, and distributors, we'll use an italic monospaced font, for example, Distributor1 . The Web Site We've established a Web site for Software Pipelines technology at softwarepipelines.org . The site is for readers of the book and for anyone else who is interested in using or advancing the Software Pipelines architecture. You can download the following items from the site: Tools and sample report templates for the Software Pipelines Optimization Cycle (SPOC) methodology Source code for the reference Pipelines Framework Complete source code for all examples in the book Articles and discussions on pipelines technology and its applications We hope you find Software Pipelines as exciting as we've found it, and that you take this opportunity to capitalize on its capabilities and use it to help overcome your own performance and scalability challenges. Excerpted from Software Pipelines and SOA: Releasing the Power of Multi-Core Processing by Cory Isaacson, Brad Abrams, Krzysztof Cwalina All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.