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Replay Solutions Awarded U.S. Patent Enabling Higher Quality Multi-Threaded Applications by Reproducing and Fixing Race Conditions
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Redwood City, CA -- Replay Solutions (www.replaysolutions.com), a pioneer in application logging, software debugging and problem resolution technology, today announced it has been awarded a U.S. patent around finding and fixing race conditions, the most common defect type found in multi-threaded Java applications and also arguably the toughest class of software problems to reproduce and fix. The technology is available for immediate download at http://replaysolutions.com/download.
Multi-threaded applications are critical in the development of virtualization, cloud computing and any application developed to take advantage of today's ubiquitous multi-core processors. However, multi-threaded applications are very difficult to build and even more difficult to manage and debug. Race conditions are becoming increasingly common in today's multi-threaded computing environment, but one of the most infamous race conditions was in 2003, causing thelargest power outage in North America's history affecting more than 55 million people in the U.S. and Canada.
Replay Solutions' patent is the result of more than 6 years of research and development and is built upon Replay's core patented replay technology. The unique approach quickly identifies and resolves race conditions faster than previously possible.
Replay's solution:
- Has a very low overhead on performance (a key challenge with previous race condition debuggers).
- Handles race conditions in production, with customers in the field, as well as in QA and development.
- Handles other types of multi-threaded issues such as deadlocks, live-locks and thread resource contention.
"The move to multi-threaded applications is critical for the advancement of the software industry, but only if we address the necessary issues around software quality in these new complex computing environments. Replay Solutions has once again tackled one of application development's biggest problems," said Jonathan Lindo, co-founder and CEO of Replay Solutions. "Our R&D team, consisting of deep experts in the fields of software security, compliance and defect resolution, has removed one of the most ominous and time-consuming roadblocks that stand in front of developers and application teams today."
Other Resources:
- James Reinders, Director, Intel Software Development Products: "Development of Parallel Applications face three challenges: Scaling, Correctness and Maintenance. The emergence of high quality abstract models such as Intel Threading Building Blocks and advanced tools such as Intel Parallel Studio help with all three, but more support in more tools is important for industry success. The challenge needing the most innovation for solutions is clearly debugging. Debugging parallel applications challenges developer and improving this is a most worthy challenge for tool vendors."
- "Platform Computing: Multithreaded and Networked Programming" by Thomas W. Christopher and George K. Thiruvathukal and available on the Sun/Oracle Developer Network: http://java.sun.com/developer/Books/performance2/chap3.pdf. "This chapter is dedicated to race conditions which undoubtedly account for most of the problems that occur in concurrent programming."
About ReplayDIRECTOR 3.0
In March, 2010, Replay Solutions launched ReplayDIRECTOR 3.0, a major advancement for Java replay for JBoss, Tomcat and WebLogic application teams. In addition to several key feature upgrades, ReplayDIRECTOR 3.0 can now be used as a secure, hosted service. No servers need to be installed allowing teams to be up and running in 5 minutes, with no infrastructure to manage.
A free trial of ReplayDIRECTOR 3.0 is available at www.replaysolutions.com.
About Replay Solutions, Inc.
Replay Solutions automates problem resolution across the application lifecycle. Its flagship ReplayDIRECTOR™ solution makes application teams more productive by taking the guesswork out of finding and fixing problems in development, test, and production environments. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, the company was founded in 2004 and is backed by Hummer Winblad, Partech Ventures, Sigma Partners and UV Partners. For more information, please visit www.replaysolutions.com.
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