TS-Associates, developers of TipOff, the market leading solution for the precise measurement and management of low-latency messaging infrastructures, announces that the Application Tap is now also supported on Microsoft Windows and separately, the product now leverages Direct Memory Access (DMA) to offer further reductions in its already minimal performance overhead.
The Application Tap, a PCI Express (PCIe) card that enables the implementation of precisely timed software instrumentation with minimal performance overhead, in its third generation hardware release on Linux, is now available for the first time on Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows Server 2008 R2. The product has even more relevance on the Windows platform than on Linux as a result of delivering its precision instrumentation capabilities with real time nanosecond scale precision. As with the Linux version, both PTP and PPS are supported for clock synchronisation.
With this release also comes a significant Application Tap FPGA firmware enhancement, leveraging DMA. Whereas previously, the Application Tap API used the host CPU to transfer data, this work is now done by FPGA firmware. The result is a significant reduction in the already minimal performance overhead of using the Application Tap, together with the raising of the maximum instrumentation message size from 64 bytes to 64 Kbytes. This new capability opens up a new range of use cases for the Application Tap.
Henry Young, TS-Associates CEO, says, "As the Application Tap matures, it is finding ever wider uses, with much of the innovation in its usage being pioneered by our customers. Our innovative use of DMA 'FPGA pull' in place of 'CPU push' further minimises the performance impact of using the Application Tap, and in turn opens up yet more use cases. We are currently developing a range of performance acceleration products based on the Application Tap as the key technology enabler. We are also working on a 10Gbit version of the product which we expect to be releasing in Q4 2011."
By combining a user mode, kernel bypass API, with an on-board FPGA co-processor and high precision clock, the Application Tap delivers hitherto unavailable insights into the performance dynamics of real time applications. This unique software precision instrumentation tool is suitable both le both as an enabler of production systems monitoring, and also for a range of software performance optimisation tasks such as deterministic profiling.
The Application Tap is available, exclusively from TS-Associates. The technology underpinning the product is currently patent pending.