Sanae BEKKAR – My Blog –

The technique that connects all system components with each other is called Exabus.

It is an I/O-based communication fabric to provide the basis for Exalogic’s reliability, scalability, and performance.

It has the function of extending and connecting the PCI e-based system bus used within each of the major system components. Exabus is based on Quad Data Rate (QDR) Infiniband.

QDR is a technique that takes advantage of the multicore CPU architecture which enhances CPU speed and consists of hardware, software, and firmware distributed throughout the system and involving every major system component.

The Infiniband specification was developed by Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, with Next Generation I/O developed by Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

This technique has been used by Oracle for its own engineered system, which is in fact a high performance computin.

Exabus uses low-level drivers which operate directly on kernel level, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) which loads directly into memory instead of acting directly on OS level.

Kernel-level Java Virtual Machines are optimized using memory buffers which leads to fewer garbage collects, and this of course, leads to higher performance, because garbage collection can be an intensive action to perform.

Having more memory available, the need of doing frequent garbage collects disappears and can be done at an appropriate time so the application does not notice anything of these actions.

The Exalogic Software consists of three APIs:

• RDMA API is the API being used to accelerate Tuxedo and make use of all benefits of all the extreme performing hardware

• The Message bus API is meant for accelerating Coherence

• Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) API is meant to accelerate WebLogic.

You can see the position of the Exabus stack and, in particular, Tuxedo: