International Character's parallel bitstream technology forms the basis of the two software projects described below.

Parabix™

Using IC’s parallel bit stream technology, Parabix™ XML processing software can realize CPU performance on low-cost CPUs exceeding even that of today's specialized hardware. So an organization can avoid purchasing specialized XML hardware devices and instead speed up XML processing by running Parabix. Parabix makes XML parsing, extraction, and validation features available to software running on servers, desktop machines, and even portable devices. It can parse text-oriented XML documents on commodity processors at over 200MB/sec per processor GHz and data-oriented XML documents at speeds approaching that. The addition of validation and object creation will result in overall performance above 100MB/sec/GHz. By way of comparison, XML Screamer performs parsing, validation and business object creation on commodity processors at the rate of 23-46 MB/sec/GHz, and traditional validating parsers only 2.5-6 MB/sec/GHz.

Click here to find out more about Parabix or to try it out. More details about the techniques used are provided in High Performance XML Parsing Using Parallel Bit Stream Technology by R. Cameron, K. Herdy and D. Lin.

Parabix software currently works on today's most popular Intel, Power PC and AMD processors:

• Intel/AMD P3 with MMX, P4 with SSE, Core 2 with SSE
• Power PC G4/G5 with Altivec

UTF-8 to UTF-16 Transcoding

IC provides complete software routines for UTF-8 to UTF-16 transcoding under open source or commercial licenses, including literate programming documentation and and an extensive test suite. Cited as a major bottleneck in XML processing, the transcoding problem is completely solved by IC software, offering 3 to 25 time speed-ups with MMX, SSE, Altivec or Cell Broad-band Engine SIMD capabilities.

Click here to find out more about the transcoder or to try it out.