JavaOne: Intel and Oracle talk up collaboration on Java and Middleware

Intel and Oracle have touted big performance gains as the result of an ongoing optimisation partnership between the two firms.

The companies on Monday took to the stage of the JavaOne conference in San Francisco to discuss the ways in which Oracle software has been optimised to run with Intel's latest processor lines.

Doug Fisher, vice president and general manager of Intel's systems software division, said that by combining Intel's hardware with specially-optimised Oracle software, researchers have been able to craft systems which claimed record performance the SPECJBB2005 Java server benchmark.

Along with the overall performance benchmark logged by a 64-chip cluster, engineers were able to set performance records for 2, 4 and 8-socket server platforms.

The performance benefits also extend to the Fusion Middleware brand. The companies said that latest tests of the platform on Intel hardware show a four socket server capable of handling up to 20,000 concurrent users.

Oracle and Intel credited much of the performance gains to the four-year partnership which has paired up engineers and developers from both firms.

"We spend a lot of time looking for optimisation that will give the best value in the systems we are producing," said Oracle director of VM technology John Pampuch.

"Customers can put the hardware to use the day they ship and get the best performance out of them."

The two firms believe the benefits of the partnership help new users see immediate performance benefits when new chips are introduced.

"The main reason this works so well is the software takes advantage of the hardware," explained Saeed Mirza, director of Fusion Middleware performance for Oracle.

"Before the hardware and software rolls into the datacentre it is already tuned and optimised to get the best performance."

Both Oracle and Intel have been looking to extend the size and scope of their server and database platforms recently. Oracle has taken aim at the big data analytics market with the unveiling of its Exalytics platform, while Intel has used its many-cores platform for emerging fields such as exa-scale supercomputing.