Feature of the Month: MatriX

Last month we highlighted a feature of the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation. Cincom Smalltalk supports connectivity to all major relational databases including Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server®, PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB/2 and SQLite. VisualWorks also connects easily with OODBMS systems.

This month, we are highlighting a feature of the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation called, MatriX. It is a significant benefit to be able to utilize the full power of modern multi-core CPUs. Product management wanted this capability in our products and challenged engineering to develop something in this space. The result exceeded expectations.

What came from that challenge was our multi-core solution, MatriX. The result fit the requirements of product management; it’s simple, pragmatic, easy to use and effective.

“MatriX is a framework you can use for coarse-grained concurrency. You can initiate and coordinate tasks to run concurrently (and generally on their own CPU core) and gather the results with a simple API. It is easy to utilize and receive significant benefits. Where applicable, MatriX can give you big improvements in throughput.”

– Arden Thomas, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager

In talking to customers and partners, we have seen several who are using it and enjoying its advantages.  In fact, one customer talked of running three times faster. That is effective indeed, under proper circumstances.

“We are successfully using MatriX in our project. One thing we use it for is to parallelize execution of (time-consuming) unit tests that check code quality. These tests execute at 28 percent of original time, when using MatriX on a quad-core box.” 

– Current Cincom VisualWorks customer

We have several videos about MatriX in our YouTube video library, including:

• An Introduction to MatriX and An Introduction to MatriX
• MatriX: A Powerful Way to Boost Application Performance
• MatriX: The Pain of Concurrency
• MatriX: “Big Gains” with “Little Pain”

There are more features of the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation. To learn more about each one, click here.