Scaling Up a Real Application on Azul
TS-5354

A short case study of a Java technology-based application doing device driver model checking. The basic application uses many small bits of work or independent tasks. Doing any one task may produce more tasks. The work is highly unstructured and very fine grained. In theory, this coding style should be endlessly scalable but in practice there were a number of issues, mostly due to the fine-grained nature of the tasks. The initial attempt used only a handful CPUs on Azul, but after 3 or 4 small modifications we got all 384 CPUs cranking away - and ran the job 45x faster than the fast P4 it was running on. Time to complete a proof dropped from *weeks* to *hours*.

I'll demonstrate the steps needed to do basic performance analysis, discover the scaling bottlenecks, and discuss the application changes that were needed.

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