Shift to multicore processors inevitable, but enterprises face challenges

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"Advocate for single licensing for multicore processors," advises analyst William Terrill of Info-Tech Research in a paper on multicore servers issued last year. "Where possible, the licensing for these applications should allow one license for any number of cores within a processor chip. . . . While some vendors will resist, selecting alternatives that do offer more cost-effective terms will eventually move the market."

Another key is to negotiate enterprisewide licenses to make all that per-core, per-server messiness go away. "[Vendors] never gain when they have licensing policies that customers don't like," Staten says. "You have to start screaming at these vendors about what you want and how you want it to be counted."

Finding apps that fit

Multicore systems offer obvious advantages in terms of processing power. That's why the Holland Computing Center at the University of Nebraska is upgrading a 1,151-server supercomputer from dual- to quad-core AMD chips. "We can double the amount of compute cycles we provide to researchers," says Jim Skirvin, president of the center.
But not every application is suited to a multicore environment.

When considering what applications are best able to take advantage of multicore processors, think multithread: applications that have multiple threads and processes that can run simultaneously by using more than one core. Performance-sensitive "heat-seeker" applications used by people in high-performance computing, financial services, or the oil and gas discovery industry "could probably consume every core we give them today and then some," says Shannon Poulin, director of Intel Xeon marketing.

Mainstream applications like SAP's and databases and Web-based programs are also well suited to multicore, Poulin says. Single-threaded programs, such as most audio applications, are better off fully utilizing just one CPU core, one tester found last year.

Because a single-core system is generally faster than the individual cores within a multicore processor, a single-threaded application that's tied to processor clock-speed would slow down on a multicore system, according to Sun's Simmons.

Applications already optimized for the multicore world include Windows Server 2003, Sun Solaris 10 OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and HP’s Unix operating system, according to Info-Tech's Terrill.

But industrywide, "the software is a little behind right now," Forrester's Staten says. "There are some applications that can take advantage of an eight-core system right out of the gate, but the majority of them cannot."

Large businesses and research centers aren't necessarily going to scrap a single-threaded application that works well, particularly if it's mission-critical and would be hard to replace. Mike Lang, a technical staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, says the lab is deploying more than 2,300 quad-core AMD Barcelona processors this year for capacity computing, scientific applications and simulations.

Los Alamos, however, isn't going to rewrite the numerous custom applications it uses, including one that has about 100,000 lines of code. "The applications are big enough that it's cheaper to buy the right computer than to rewrite the applications," Lang says.