Ateji has released Ateji PX for Java, a Java extension that for providing compatibility with existing sequential code, tools, and training. The extension provides only parallelism-related aspects, with the addition of a couple of syntactic constructions.
Ateji PX is implemented by source-to-source translation to the base language, with the goal of ensuring compatibility with existing development tools. This also helps keeping the base language lean and standard. In other words, Ateji PX builds upon existing languages and tools to provide parallel programming primitives integrated at the language level.
Ateji PX is compatible with the Java language and is integrated with the Eclipse IDE. Ateji claims that it requires only minimal learning of the additional parallel constructs and no changes to the development process.
"The emergence of a solution of this type addresses a critical need of processor manufacturers and software developers," says Ateji's Patrick Viry. "Currently these ultra-powerful multi-core processors are underutilized: programming them is complex, they are hard to debug and can only be programmed by highly specialized individuals trained in multi-threading. With Ateji PX, writing programs for multi-core systems becomes simple, intuitive, secure and can easily be learned by all application developers."
Viry goes on to say that "in just one day, one of our customers, a leading investment bank, was able to parallelize a major back-office Java application, Users were relieved when running time suddenly dropped from 40 minutes to 8 minutes."
According to the company, Ateji PX provides message-passing at the language level. This enables the compiler to map distributed programs to various target architectures and write code that is independent of any given library. Even when considering only multi-core hardware, programs written in message-passing style tend to have less bugs (no data races, no locks), scale better (less traffic on the shared bus), and are ready for the hardware architectures of the future.
With Ateji PX, a source code written in message-passing style will also run without modifications on computer clusters, MPI-based supercomputers, across a network, and in the Cloud. A distributed version of Ateji PX is in preparation, where parallel branches can be run at remote locations.
