In the past several decades, x86 architecture has been the dominating server architecture, a full ecosystem has been built around Intel and AMD. Over 95% of the Top-500 supercomputer systems are built using x86-64bit architecture, and the overall high-performance computing landscape has been like this for the past 10 years. Three years ago, it was a natural choice for the team at Ultipa to build a lightning-fast real-time general-purpose graph database on top of x86 architecture.
Our team have done a really great job by leveraging x86 CPU’s parallel computing capabilities and morphing that into our patent-pending high-density parallel graph computing. While the other graph computing or database players deal with every graph query with a sequential mindset, Ultipa serves in a highly parallel fashion. This does involve sophisticated data structure, system architecture design, coding logic optimization, but the gist is simple: the performance gain is in the range of orders of magnitude.
Today there are more and more companies, on-demand cloud computing platforms, like Amazon Web Services, willing to adopt ARM-architecture CPU because ARM chipset is smaller in footprint, carbon footprint, which is equivalent to energy efficiency and less costs; higher number of cores, meaning better parallelism and because ARM-based system design is easier and cheaper.
Ultipa could not ignore them, so our company decided to also support ARM just like how we did on x86. After all, ARM ecosystem deserves to have a lightning fast graph database, and that has to be Ultipa Graph. Unlike the ARM-to-x86 emulation or virtualization approach, Ultipa decided to take a native and from ground-up approach, the entire code base, algorithms, libraries, toolchains, common-line tools, graphical user interfaces are all transformed along the way. We also need to ensure we fully leverage ARM architecture’s capabilities, such as better parallelization, memory management, and more. Ultipa Graph database natively supports ARM, with comparable performance to x86 platforms.
GRAPH DATABASE TO NATIVELY SUPPORT BOTH
X86 AND ARM ARCHITECTURES.