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Java in a 64-bit World
BEA WebLogic JRockit on the Intel Itanium 2 Processor: An Excellent Combination
by Kumar Shiv, Guru Nagarajan, and Christopher S. Thomas

Posted May 24, 2004

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design paradigm that enables ubiquitous communication across enterprises, connecting numerous platforms and devices and resulting in a more flexible infrastructure. The popularity of SOAs is a result of the tremendous success of industry standardization around Extensible Markup Language (XML) for defining metadata as well as the focus on using XML to develop a new generation of middleware under the Web services (WbS) label.

The majority of major software solution providers have embraced Web services offering, application platform suite products, like BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, to seamlessly integrating products from multiple vendors across the enterprise. This approach facilitates a methodology for integrating the "new" with the "legacy." As such, the move to SOA has major implications in three areas: enterprise application integration (EAI), business to business (B2B) integration and, more recently, mobilized software solutions. SOA facilitates the assembly of the hardware and software building blocks providing the right business services at the appropriate granularity. This enables enterprises to scale-up on the Intel Itanium 2 family of processors or scale-out on Intel Xeon processors. The move to SOA solutions also blurs the distinction between servers and clients, making all connectable devices valuable contributors within the corporate computing environment.

Rapidly proliferating wireless devices are quickly becoming the beneficiaries of the growing foundation of SOA-based solutions. Delivering XML data between applications provides the foundation for SOA and allows devices to atomically exchange information and extend flexible computing outside the boundaries of traditional office environments.

Hardware and software advances can further facilitate the shift to SOA, which requires performance in both raw speed and the ability to manipulate increasing amounts of data. The Intel Itanium family of processors accelerates computing power by allowing the direct addressing of larger amounts of memory while providing enterprise-class reliability, availability, and scalability features.

In addition to capable hardware, SOA requires an execution environment that can take advantage of the available performance. BEA's WebLogic JRockit is an enterprise Java virtual machine (JVM), utilizing full 64-bit functionality, which delivers exceptional performance. BEA WebLogic JRockit leverages groundbreaking code performance and adaptive optimization, along with innovative, scalable adaptive garbage collectors to ensure optimal performance on the Intel Itanium 2 Architecture.

Enterprise Java and 64-bit Addressing
Server applications, in particular, tend to utilize the availability of a large amount of memory. Enterprise Java applications tend to access a lot of data, and the large address space reduces disk accesses significantly. Additionally, large memory allows caching of data received from network accesses, potentially reducing network traffic as well. Industry leading benchmarks such as SPECjbb2000 perform better on 64-bit architectures such as the Intel Itanium 2 microprocessor (see Table 1).

Java applications allocate objects into a heap and as a rule, have a high rate of object allocation. When the heap has been fully utilized, garbage collection has to happen in order to free up heap space for the application to continue to run. Many large Java applications benefit by having larger heaps, since the garbage collection overhead is reduced, and a larger heap may allow the JVM more flexibility in finding a less intrusive point at which to collect garbage.