AdaCore Announces GNAT Pro for the VxWorks SMP Capability

Bringing a multi-threaded language to multi-core

NEW YORK, PARIS, and SAN DIEGO - MILCOM 2008 -AdaCore, provider of the highest quality Ada tools and support, today announced the availability of GNAT Pro for Wind River’s VxWorks 6.6 SMP product. This powerful Ada development environment brings a language that was designed from the ground up to support multi-processing to an operating system that takes advantage of multi-core processors.

Multi-core technology is the next transformative technology for the Device Software Optimization (DSO) industry. With the SMP add-on product installed, VxWorks platforms are enhanced with symmetric multi-processing (SMP) capabilities within the operating system, network stack, and development tools to provide the easiest path to realize the benefits of multi-core technology.

The Ada language is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this new technology. Ada supports multi-processing via its tasking construct. Multi-threading, mutual exclusion, and inter-process communication are handled by the rendezvous mechanism and protected types/objects. The latter provides a reliable and efficient building block for defining semaphores and events for inter-task communication.

“GNAT Pro brings a powerful programming language to our new multicore platform,” said Rob Hoffman, Vice President and General Manager of Aerospace and Defense at Wind River. “This provides a unique capability for VxWorks users, especially those developing applications that need to meet high-reliability requirements. Users can take existing Ada software and port it to our SMP platform to immediately take advantage of its multi-processing capabilities. Moreover, new programs can also instantly take advantage of this capability when developing Ada or mixed-language applications.”

“This is an exciting time for the software industry,” said Robert Dewar, President and CEO of AdaCore. “The Ada language was designed from the start for multi-threaded applications. On a single cpu system this was typically handled by a multiplexing scheduler to simulate parallel processing. With multi-cpu’s or multi-core processors these tasks may now truly run in parallel physically. While developers using other programming languages are struggling to find how to take advantage of this new hardware, Ada developers can immediately leverage tried and tested features that have been in the language for years.”

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore's flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railroad systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com

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