2005 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

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Letterkenny Institute of Technology
Ruth Lennon
Designing scalable software – a modern approach to a legacy problem.

When software requires development all good programmers create a design model from which to develop the finalised software. Many of the design models currently being used involve iterative process design phases, which ignore the development of efficiencies in central processing unit (CPU) usage. A more appropriate design model would include this in order to save both time and money often wasted in product development. One company we spoke to was seven months late releasing software due to problems scaling the software. This company is not the only one having these problems. A significant number of applications are being developed without due consideration to the workload and restraints being placed on the underlying resources. The employment of refactoring techniques to improve the software design process, while improving the efficiency of the software, does imply significant time wastage.


Getting the most from your CPU Cycles through efficient design procedures.

This research outlines a number of techniques that may be applied to the development of software for e-business with particular emphasis placed on the improvement of CPU cycle usage. Applying economies within the code from the initial design phase increases the overall efficiency of the system to be developed. In this research, we are particularly interested in the development of efficiencies in applications connected to a mainframe. Many large financial institutions and insurance companies employ mainframe technologies. These institutions, which update some software requirements with the progress in technologies, may not consider the impact of modern coding languages connecting to such a legacy system. Scaling software solutions is particularly important due to the nature of their business. This research will provide a guideline for the improvement of CPU cycle usage in the design phase of software development, resulting in the cost reduction of software development. It is anticipated that the guidelines created will be sufficiently flexible to be applied to any software program development including, e-business software, database management software and games development.

Contact: Ruth Lennon,
Department of Computing, Letterkenny Institute of Technology,
Port Road, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal;
E-mail: [email protected] , Web: www.lyit.ie