Largest Provider of Commercial Smalltalk
Cincom is one of the largest commercial providers of Smalltalk, with twice as many partners and customers than other commercial providers.
Tom Nies
MatriX
What is MatriX?
Most commercial applications do not leverage the power of today’s multi-core CPUs, largely in part to the fact that it is not trivial to do so. Product management thought that this capability would be a large benefit to Smalltalkers, and challenged engineering to develop something in this space. It was a challenge because doing something meaningful was daunting.
What came from that challenge was our multi-core solution. The result fit the requirements of product management; it’s simple, pragmatic, easy to use and effective. The framework our engineers developed is called Polycephaly—a term meaning “many heads.”
“MatriX: a framework you can add for basic concurrency. It’s really easy and not hard to change your code to use it and receive big benefits. The return on investment is huge! MatriX gives you a big bang for your buck and a huge amount of improvement.” – Arden Thomas, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager
In talking to customers, several seem to be using it and enjoying its advantages. In fact, one customer talked of running at 3X faster. That is effective indeed, under proper circumstances.
“We are successfully using MatriX in our project. One thing we use it for is to parallelize execution of (time-consuming) unit tests that check code quality. These tests execute at 28 percent of original time, when using MatriX on a quad-core box.” – Current Cincom® VisualWorks® customer
Articles, Video and Other Presentations
- An Introduction to MatriX (video)
- Getting More From Your Multicore PCs (video)
- Getting More From Your Multicore With MatriX (video)
- How Can We Get the Most Out of Our Modern CPUs?
- “Big Gains” with “Little Pain”
- The Pain of Concurrency
- A Powerful Way to Boost Performance
- Additional Observations on Concurrency
- Polycephaly
- Archived articles
