However, after shelling out money for the new technology, Dykstra found three of the four cores were sitting idle, because the software he was running wasn't built to make use of multiple cores.
Dykstra isn't alone in his disappointment with the lack of software for multicore chips. As hardware firms increase the number of cores in single chips, most software simply isn't keeping pace, creating a huge drag on efforts to take advantage of the potentially significant hardware-based performance improvements.
In order for users to see those performance gains, software designed for use on multicore chips must be built to let different cores handle different tasks in an application at the same time.
Dykstra noted that while some server software from major vendors like Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. has been partially multithreaded, for the most part there is a dearth of such applications.
Once Dykstra, co-founder and a senior partner at Columbia-Md.-based Jones Dykstra & Associates, identified which applications were most important to his firm, then he compiled a list of vendors, picked up the phone and started haranguing them to add support for the chips. He didn't identify the vendors.
Despite the experiences of Dykstra and others, some IT managers have been able to cut costs and hardware needs by using multicore technology in virtualization projects.
For instance, when a company goes down the virtualization road with multicore systems, each core is assigned its own virtual machine, allowing each to run a separate application.
Virtualization on multicore chips is working out very well for Bruce McMillan, manager of emerging technologies at the U.S. division of Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Marietta, Ga., who has scaled up his virtual machine total by 50% while cutting the number of physical servers in his data center almost in half.
McMillan said he had been running 100 virtual machines on eight servers with single-core processors. He added two dual-core servers about a year ago and he was able to scale from 100 to 150 virtual machines.
About a month ago, Solvay installed a quad-core server, which enabled it to retire three single-core servers. The company is now in the process of adding two more quad-core servers, which will replace all of the remaining single-core systems, according to McMillan.
"It's saved me $500,000 just in hardware costs" so far, he said. "I can have much higher consolidation ratios than I had before. This is about server consolidation."
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