Azul compute platforms do not run traditional general-purpose operating systems. The integrated system software provides the appliance the management and execution environments for virtual machine engines. The Azul integrated system software was designed with three key objectives:
- Enable throughput scalability to hundreds of concurrent threads
- Provide real-time response to rapid changes in resource demand to ensure consistent response times
- Enable fine-grained allocation and control of application resources
The breakthrough technology components that make up the Azul Vega 3 Solution are:
Azul Vega Processor - The first 54-core chip designed and optimized for Java workloads. The Vega chip includes features not found in conventional processors, enabling a variety of optimizations that would otherwise be not possible. With support for features such as read and write barriers that help optimize garbage collection and object relocation, speculative locking to enable safe concurrent execution of code that would otherwise be serialized, and an instruction set designed for the needs of virtual machines, the Vega processor is designed to provide consistently high throughput to Java applications. In addition, Azul Vega Processors have enterprise grade Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features designed into them, such as, predictive failure analysis for de-configuration and system memory chip-kill technology.
Azul Virtual Machine (AVM) - was designed to scale applications, while efficiently leveraging the capacity of the Azul Vega Appliances. The AVM provides 64-bit memory address space, even for applications originating from 32-bit hosts. It allows individual application instances to scale to 670 GB of memory and hundreds of processor cores, without changing the application code. This breakthrough scalability is achieved with unique capabilities such as hardware-assisted Pauseless Garbage Collection, which eliminates the impact of garbage collection-related application pauses, and Optimistic Thread Concurrency which minimizes the impact of scalability bottlenecks caused by synchronization and lock contentions.
Compute Pool Manager (CPM) - is a fully-integrated software application that allows administrators to manage a set of individual Vega 3 appliances as a single pool of resources. Azul CPM is a flexible, policy based management application that provides control of compute pool resources by dynamically allocating and redistributing compute resources within a pool to the various Java applications. It also provides a consolidated view of all the resources and applications in the pool to manage them from a single console. In addition, it lets users snapshot and track historical appliance capacity utilization and application resource usage.
REALTime Performance Monitor (RTPM) - is a diagnostics and tuning tool instrumented into the AVM and offers a uniquely detailed view of all performance aspects of an application, including thread, memory, and IO profiles. RTPM is always-on and has zero performance overhead. Hence, it is the ideal tool to use in production deployments to identify performance issues as they happen and take rapid corrective measures. Since it is integrated into the AVM, there is no set up required and the information is always available.