Atego launches Aonix PERC Ultra SMP 5.4

Atego’s flagship Virtual Machine technology and supporting tool chain, Aonix PERC Ultra® is one of the most deployed embedded and real-time Virtual Machines in the industry and was recently tested and deployed in time-critical applications ranging from the Aegis weapons system on the guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill to the in-flight entertainment and cabin management systems on the Cessna Citation CJ4 business jet. Aonix PERC Ultra SMP adds support to empower large mission-critical systems to more fully utilize multiple processors at peak performance.

Aonix PERC Ultra SMP, first introduced in 2008 provided parallel garbage collection (GC), a memory management technique allowing the use of all processors/cores for faster identification and collection of unused objects. A dual quad-core Xeon-based Linux real-time system could collect discarded memory nearly eight times faster than a single-threaded garbage collector but could not run concurrent with other application threads until now.

The new version of PERC Ultra further improves the efficiency of the garbage collection process by implementing concurrent GC. Compared to parallel GC, concurrent GC allows collection of unused objects by multiple processors while Java application threads continue to operate concurrently. PERC Ultra’s GC dynamically allocates available processors/cores to perform garbage collection tasks without disrupting active Java threads on other cores. This enhances the ability of the GC to pace the garbage collection rate to the application’s memory allocation rate.

“We’re very pleased with this new advance in our Java technology,” said James B. Gambrell, Executive Chairman at Atego. “Atego’s customers are already planning multi-core upgrades in their systems and eager to make the shift to faster multi-core Java execution. The latest PERC release not only improves overall system functionality, but also provides broader platform availability.”

With the release of Aonix PERC Ultra SMP 5.4 new SMP-capable RTOS platforms and target processors are supported. In addition to previously supported Linux development systems targeting Red Hat Linux, Red Hawk Linux, and Wind River Linux on x86 targets, new support for Linux and Windows systems targeting QNX Neutrino on x86, and Wind River VxWorks on x86 are available.