As a leading provider of value-added network services in Korea, Smartro processes millions of invoice, settlement, credit card, and purchase transactions a day for Korean retailers. To speed up manual data extraction and analysis processes, Smartro implemented a data warehouse using the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance Optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. Smartro now has a technology foundation for expanding its business and processing more transaction data. Because business users can easily produce their own reports, report requests have decreased by 62 percent, and data extraction time has been slashed by 80 percent. Additionally, Smartro can adapt its data warehouse to accommodate constantly changing regulatory policies.

In testing semiconductor wafers, AMD uses a data warehouse to process and analyze one terabyte of data each week. When its data warehouse began foundering under the load, AMD switched to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse powered by AMD Opteron™ processors. With the new system, AMD has increased performance and enabled a sustainable and scalable solution.

Video game studio Relic Entertainment needed to parallelize its code to speed up the package-creation process—the last step in converting the output of content creators into a playable format for test. Early work to parallelize package-creation tools was complex and time-consuming, resulting in thousands of lines of code. By taking advantage of new parallel programming tools in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the .NET Framework 4, Relic was able to quickly and easily reduce that number to just 12 lines of code. The package-creation process now takes 30 minutes instead of four hours, enabling the company to more quickly begin testing new changes. Relic was able to begin using the parallel processing libraries provided in the .NET Framework 4 quickly and easily, with a negligible learning curve.

To make colon cancer screening more broadly accessible, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) sought to reduce the time required to electronically cleanse and view a three-dimensional (3-D) model of the colon from an hour to five minutes. MGH reduced processing times to two minutes by optimizing its native Visual C++ code for 64-bit execution and using the Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library to parallelize the code, achieving the performance required to support mass colon cancer screening. The screening approach pioneered by MGH can also drastically decrease costs and is far more patient friendly, avoiding the many negatives of an optical colonoscopy. Radiologists can navigate and interpret the 3-D images of a colon by using gestures on a touchscreen-enabled PC, and diagnostic accuracy is improved through computer-aided identification of potential polyps.