An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye:

“Racing to Gain Edge on Multicore Chips” (by Don Clark, 17 March 2008,  page B4) explains how Intel and Microsoft are turning to universities for research into new programming techniques to make it easier to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of modern multi-core architectures.

What struck me was that the Aleri CEP engine is just such a programming tool: it uses a dataflow programming model to allow someone defining a complex set of business logic to break it up into a series of discrete operations, where the output of one becomes the input of another. The Aleri Streaming Platform is fully multi-threaded, so each “stream” runs in it’s own thread, allowing streams to run in parallel, taking full advantage of all the cores and CPUs that are available. An application developer, using Aleri’s high level authoring tools, defines the business logic that will be applied to incoming events to produce the desired output, without needing to have any awareness of threads, cores and parallel processing. Thus Aleri takes care of the scalability and how to harness all available cores; the user simply focuses on the business logic.