Leveraging multi-core CPUs in the context of demand planning

Over the last couple of years a paradigm shift in CPU development has been happening: away from increasing the clock rate towards increasing the numbers of cores per CPU. In order to leverage the resulting new architectures, nowadays business applications have to be rewritten or at least adapted. This paper describes the most characteristic operations in the context of demand planning which is a crucial part of supply chain management. Furthermore, it presents different strategies how those operations can be distributed onto several cores. The different strategies were prototypically implemented and measured on different systems (including Intel Core and Nehalem Microarchitecture) in order to determine their efficiency. The paper concludes with a comparison of the different strategies, identifies the most efficient one, and describes the potential performance gain in demand planning by leveraging multi-core CPUs.