Final Linux Benchmarks Of Project Dirndl

To much dismay, the major open-source announcement we have been waiting for, did not happen this week. Yes, this is the major open-source announcement that we have codenamed Dirndl. It is really that deserving of such a fitting codename. As our early tests have shown, it can dramatically speed-up the system's performance in computationally intensive workloads. No other open-source solution comes close in many of these tests, albeit there are some other proprietary brethren. In this article are some more details and performance results for what has been called "Dirndl" in technology terms.

While I am bound by an agreement from spilling the full scoop on what this major open-source announcement is, it seems to be okay with the company to spill a few beans of what this actual event is about. Now that the company in question has sorted out their press release problems, the announcement will go live next week. [I will be damn sure about that after it has been postponed for nearly two weeks and causing conflicts with the Phoronix publishing queue.] Look for a proper four-page Phoronix announcement on Monday or Tuesday, at which point you can also download the sources / binary to this wonderful Dirndl. Until then, some important notes about this pending release include:

- Something that was previously proprietary and costs well over one thousand dollars (USD) or more per license, is now available freely.
- Not only is this innovative software component available at no cost, but also its source code will be available under the GNU GPL license.
- This software component is especially helpful for computationally intensive workloads and where the code is able to scale to multiple cores.
- Likewise, those using intense applications should be able to benefit from this "Dirndl."
- The company producing this software has been open-source friendly in the past.
- This is not some software from a new corporate venture.
- This is not some magic bullet; most basic software applications will not find a sudden difference.
- This is not to be confused with the Bavarian dirndl dress, as most commonly found at Oktoberfest, but both creations are wonderful.

- This is very big news for open-source software.
- Contrary to some reader thoughts, this is not an open-source announcement from Intel. [They know very well how to handle press releases and there surely would have been leaks elsewhere by now.]
- I have also dropped more details on my Twitter feed.

Beyond the quick benchmarks delivered in previous days, here's a few more test results from vastly different systems. They are also using new test profiles compared to the initial "Dirndl" results.

The "System 1" configuration is from an AMD Opteron 2384 workstation with a 64GB OCZ Agility EX SSD and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card while on the software side had Ubuntu 11.04 with the Linux 3.0 (Git) kernel. The "System 2" configuration had an Intel Core i7 990X "Gulftown" processor with 4GB of system memory, 320GB Seagate HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX graphics card. It was running Ubuntu 10.10 with the Linux 2.6.39 kernel. Details in full along with these test results for further exploration are available via OpenBenchmarking.org.

More details to come next week, as this is becoming rather tiring how drawn-out this release process has become.