What is Azul "Zing"?
What is Azul "Zing" platform?
Visiting Azul site (link) turned into a marketing horror - and after wading through every little bit of it, I still don't have a clue.
Does anyone have any experience with it? What are the requirement for your application to be "Zing"-ed? (Zing-able?) If, for example, I have an application that loads an object graph into memory and constantly traverses huge chunks of it (so most of it is "warm" - can't store parts in slow data-stores) - can Azul help me? (I already know Terracotta BigMemory can't...)
I want to clarify - I'm looking for feedback from someone who actually "zingified" their product and put it on the Azul VM successfully (or saw that it doesn't work).
Ran.
[Edit 1 - added page link] [Edit 2- Experience wanted]
Answer
Remember what Azul used to do: make customized multicore Java appliances. An Azul machine might have 60 or 100 cores and there was all sorts of cleverness to take advantage of the parallelization (the one that impressed me was the optimistic locking: a thread that was supposed to obtain a lock just assumed that it had the lock and went forward and if it turned out later that, no, it was supposed to have blocked, it somehow unwound all its changes and went back and waited).
The problem is, of course, that custom hardware is a graveyard. Azul had spent all this time making software for hardware no one would buy. So, as a corporation they imitated their own product: they backed up, unwound their changes, and ported all their clevernesses (the optimistic locking, the hypervisor, other stuff) from custom hardware to commodity multicore machines so instead of paying $100,000 for an 80-core machine, you can spent $20,000 for 10 eight-core machines in a cloud*.
[ * All numbers surgically extracted from my anatomy. ]
Is it a good idea? Does it work? I don't know, but I hope so. I met all the Azul guys at the 2003 JavaOne and they really impressed me.