Just got back from a flying visit to our NSW and QLD branches, so been a little quiet last few days! But someone did email me about this story I blogged about last week. I've got a few mins now to clear up a few bits of (mis)information that story that got distorted along the way, and hopefully give you all a few interesting tidbids :)
Firstly and foremost, from the Computer World article, the author got the companies wrong. Sure, we have a hosting business, but we use mostly Intel cores now. Our role was actually working with the good guys at Swimming Australia. See, SAL (Swimming Australia Limited) have a very kewl application that collects a whole bunch of timing information from timing devices at all their swimming meets. This includes things like the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, all the way down to the under 10 Championships at your local pool. Now a whole bunch of these results are available on their web site, with ALL of these results being available on their Intranet and Extranet. Including historical data, its around 8GB of data with a number of different 'views' into the data (like 'fastest men under 16 100m freestyle' or 'fastest 3 women any age 200 backstroke' etc). Its all build on the .NET 1.1 Framework, using our custom code gen tool (that I spoke about last week). To make sure the web site, Intranet and Extranet are all speedy as can be, we preprocess all this information whenever we get new data.
During any major swimming event like the Olympics or World Cup, the site is taking quiet a pounding as thousands of similtaneous users hit the site performing all sorts of searches, so getting data up quickly is a really concern. So, all round good guy Dave (wheres yr blog man?? :) from Intel leant me a Bensley SDK to see how this would all work in 64 bit land. All I can say is WOW!!!
Old machine spec is 2 x P4 3.2 Xeons w/ 2GB RAM, Win2k3 and SQL 2k
SDK spec is 2 x Dual-Core processor w/ 2GB RAM, Win2k3 and SQL 2k5
The old processing time was (as it suggests in the title ;) 27 min 35. Now 4 mins 51. THATS MAD IMPROVEMENT! Sure, the SQL upgrade had something to do with it (I've got figures here somewhere where we ran in 32 bit land on the box and can post if anyone is keen), but the majority of that boost was the hardware. DAMN THIS NEW INTEL STUFF IS QUICK :)
As a side note, when we originally got the hardware, it was around Grand Prix time. One of the Intel engineers thought it would be funny to change the fan start up - I kid you not but when this box starts up, it revs like a F1 car!
PS - I have a large box sitting under my desk - think it may be another surprise from Intel Dave ;) More soon!!!
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