National Oilwell Varco Selects Aonix PERC for Java™-based Robotic Drilling

National Oilwell Varco has selected the Aonix PERC Ultra™ virtual machine (VM) for its Java™-based control system that manages automated robotic drilling. National Oilwell Varco, a leading designer and manufacturer of a broad range of technologically advanced drilling equipment, AC and DC drives, pipe-handling equipment, controls and instrumentation, made an extensive evaluation of embedded Java offerings. Varco selected PERC based on its very fast, predictable performance and small memory footprint.

To meet current application needs, Varco’s engineering team converted an existing Varco design for automated robotic drilling equipment using a Java-based control system running on embedded Linux. This design consists of a Java-based robotic control system on various x86 SBC platforms with a 2.6.11 Linux kernel. Varco required jitter below 3 ms in executing its software application over a one-hour period

using its embedded computing platform. The engineering team tested numerous JVMs on its platform, but only PERC could meet the need for very fast, predictable performance without a tremendous memory or hard drive footprint.

“J9 from IBM could not come close to the performance that I was able to achieve with PERC,” noted Kent Hulich, Varco software development manager. “We needed timing intervals below 10 ms, and Aonix provided a version of PERC that takes advantage of POSIX CLOCK_REALTIME timers in Linux 2.6 to provide very accurate timing to the application.”

But, accurate timing alone was not enough. Varco needed to preempt memory reclamation at any point in time. To do this, Varco configured PERC to place all Java threads in a real-time scheduling class and set critical thread priorities above the PERC garbage collector so they could interrupt the garbage collector as needed. Aonix’ support team assisted Varco engineers in achieving optimal configuration quickly and easily and with no changes to the source code of the Varco Java test program.

Wave7 Optics Selects Aonix PERC VM for the Trident7™ Optical Access Platform

Wave7 Optics Inc. has selected the Aonix PERC Ultra® virtual machine (VM) for their Trident7™ Optical Access Platform. Wave7, a leading supplier of fiber-to-the-home and -premises (FTTH/FTTP) broadband network equipment for residential and business services, chose to develop software based on Standard Edition Java™ (J2SE) for its portability, scalability, and productivity. The PERC Ultra VM provided predictable and reliable performance not possible with traditional Java™ solutions.

The Trident7 is the first Optical Line Terminal (OLT) with universal support for the leading FTTH and  FTTP broadband signal distribution standards. The high level of integration supported in this product’s standards-compliant feature set significantly reduces the costs and

expands the breadth of services that broadband service providers can economically deliver to home and business premises. Wave7 Optics’ decision to use PERC Ultra in the Trident7’s management module results in a significant reduction in operational expense.

“Wave7 wanted to leverage the Java language’s benefits of scalability and capacity to optimize the Trident7 OLT chassis,” noted Al Villarica, Chief Software Architect, Wave7Optics. “We chose the PERC Ultra virtual machine for its maturity, reliability, and support for Standard Edition Java.”