The Ada Resource Association congratulates Karl Nyberg of Grebyn Corporation, one of the winners of a T1000 server of a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire T1000 server valued at approximately US $15,000 in Sun Microsystems Open Performance Contest.

Karl's evaluation of the T1000, based upon his research "A Constructive Approach To Integer Factorization" against the RSA Factoring Challenge, was written in Ada. The application was implemented with many tasks working on parts of the problem simultaneously. Karl chose Ada for this project because of the elegance and simplicity of the Ada tasking model and select / accept statements. These constructs made mapping the work to multiple cores relatively simple, and allowed testing versions of the application on multiple platforms, including commodity PCs as well as the T1000, without modification.

It was very important to Karl to have a functional implementation of his algorithm quickly, so he could concentrate on performance improvements as his research progressed and as additional capabilities of the T1000 were understood and taken advantage of. Ada contributed to this goal.

Karl notes that “Ada just works out of the box and allows me to focus on the task at hand and write code that does what I mean for it to do rather than have to try to write code to convince the compiler to do what I want.”

You can read more about Karl's research and his use of Ada in this contest on his website.