ElectricAccelerator — Technical Specifications
Unlike other build tools, ElectricAccelerator® doesn't require any process changes or expensive integration projects to allow team members to take advantage of more efficient builds. ElectricAccelerator has two ways of working with a build: direct Make and Visual Studio emulation through Electric Make, and generic task interception through Electrify.
If the build uses GNU Make, NMAKE, Ant or Visual Studio, Electric Make would be used. To a user, Electric Make appears identical to other versions of Make. It produces results identical to GNU Make and Microsoft NMAKE (even the log files are identical) and works seamlessly with Symbian's Make variant, Ant, and Visual Studio. The use of a cluster for the builds is invisible to the ElectricAccelerator user, except that the builds run much faster.
Because Electric Make is a compatible replacement for existing build utilities, it works with:
And Electric Make generates identical log file output, and provides the same command-line options as GNU Make and Microsoft NMAKE, so it will work seamlessly with wrapper scripts (e.g. Perl scripts) that invoke Make and process Make output.
The Electrify interface runs existing SCons, MSBuild, JAM, dmake or homegrown builds in parallel on an ElectricAccelerator cluster. By monitoring tools that are invoked in a build and automatically distributing them to the cluster, Electrify provides access to compute power greater than that of a single, standalone build machine for faster throughput. And because Electrify does not require replacing existing build tools, it supports complex, heterogeneous environments with ease. Electrify can also be used with tasks outside of the build. For applications where multiple processors are used to speed execution, Electrify can be used as a transparent bridge to the ElectricAccelerator cluster infrastructure. Use this to accelerate unit testing, data modeling, hardware simulations, and other types of tasks.
ElectricAccelerator supports the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs and is also integrated with the Platform LSF grid computing solution to leverage grid resources to run massively parallel builds.
