Azul Open Sources Zing JVM

Java runtime scalability specialist Azul Systems has made its Zing JVM freely available to open source developers and projects that fall under the “development, qualification and testing” banner.

What this means is that apps supporting commodity x86 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Ubuntu Linux will be able to use the Zing JVM’s low latency and scalability attributes.

Azul Systems president and CEO Scott Sellers says that his company’s mission is to remove the bottlenecks commonly associated with the Java runtime and enable application innovation in a “plethora of new markets”, such as in-memory computing and big data analytics.

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NOTE: Zing itself is a 100% Java-compatible JVM based on Oracle HotSpot. Zing is optimized for Linux deployments and designed for enterprise applications and workloads that require large memory, high transaction rates, low latency, consistent response times, and high-sustained throughput. According to the Azul website, Zing is the only JVM that can elastically grow its application memory heap based on real-time demand and still guarantee response times.

Alongside latency improvement, developers adopting Zing are expected to see an elimination of response time outliers and support for large in-memory data processing. There is also elastic scalability with memory heaps that can grow or shrink based on real-time demand — plus improved production time visibility and runtime diagnostics.

“Programming and architectural approaches that leverage immutability to enhance concurrency and scale will be well-matched by a runtime that is able to support high continual allocation rates without disruptions or pauses,” said Rich Hickey, author of Clojure and designer of the Datomic database system.

Martin Thomson, creator of the Open Source Disruptor Framework and co-founder of the Lodestone Foundation, a new project focused on Open Source technology for the financial industry, said, “I’ve been working with Zing for the past few months focusing on ultra-low latency and scalable deployments. We are seeing excellent GC performance, consistency, and predictability with the Zing JVM.”