March 31, 2014
Our Quest for POWER
Note: c-treeACE became FairCom DB in November 2020.
An engine is a machine that converts power into motion. Historians date engines back to antiquity…indeed earlier if you consider simple machines that convert human power and animal power into motion. Various systems of ropes, pulleys, and cranes, used in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, were considered early engines.
Water wheels were in use in the 1st century BC and remained an important source of power for centuries to come. The steam engine was first considered in the 1st century AD, although a useful steam engine would not be developed until the 18th century, ushering in the Industrial Revolution.
Randal Hoff shows off this powerful race car.
Technology has come a long way since the simple devices of ancient times. Early animal-drawn systems could be quite literally said to have one “horse” power. The Model T had a 4-cylinder engine that produced 20 horsepower. In more recent times, every car on the street has a finely-tuned engine under its hood producing over 100 horsepower. The engines in Formula 1 racers produce from 700 to 1,000 horsepower.
The largest marine engine in the world, the Finnish Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C, is 89 feet long and 44 feet wide. With 1,820 liters per cylinder, it produces a total of 107,389 horsepower.
The largest industrial turbine engine is the 1750 MWe ARABELLE turbine generator, which runs a French generator. Each blade in this turbine weighs 176 pounds. Oh, by the way, it produces a walloping 2,346,788 horsepower.
And then there’s Saturn…
Installation of F-1 engines IN S-IC test stand.
When it comes to out-of-this-world performance, the five F‑1 engines, which propelled the Saturn V to the moon, developed a total of 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Designed over 50 years ago in the days of slide rules and pencils, the F‑1 remains the most powerful single-nozzle, liquid-fueled rocket engine ever. Last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos fished one of these behemoths out of the Atlantic Ocean at great expense because he didn’t request free shipping.
Those of you who have been following us for some time know that, at the heart of the FairCom technology is the Advanced Core Engine: the “ACE” in “c‑treeACE.” We are constantly looking for ways to make the c‑treeACE database engine more stable, more scalable, and more powerful.
Improvements in this release include a complete overhaul of the temporary memory subsystem to make SQL more robust and a variety of other changes you can read about in the V10.3 Update Guide. Find out how c‑treeACE can launch your application into new levels of performance.