Rulerunner Quattro

Rulerunner is the Taskmaster component that executes business rules for image clean-up, data recognition, data validation, and export formatting. It runs as an unattended background task performing the “heavy lifting” required for document processing.

Often recognition and other background processing represent a bottleneck in document capture processing. Two or three high-speed scanners running simultaneously may create more work than one or two Rulerunner Service stations can keep up with. The resulting backlog slows down your entire process from scan to export. 

Rulerunner Virtualization

To speed Rulerunner performance it can be run on multiple computers or multiple virtual machines, or you can take advantage of Datacap’s exclusive Rulerunner Quattro virtual recognition machine technology.  Rulerunner Quattro delivers virtualization inside of Taskmaster by utilizing the multiple processors available on many computers.  You gain the benefits of virtualization technology without the expense and complexity of multiple computers or multiple virtual machines. 

Read the FAQ on Rulerunner Quattro.

Rulerunner Quattro’s virtualization technology provides significant benefits to both the department processing documents and the organization’s IT department: 

1. Complete your document processing work faster.  Faster turn-around of documents such as claims, contracts, tax returns and invoices improves responsiveness and shortens capture cycle times.  
2. Reduce the number of physical computers dedicated to the capture process.  One multi-core computer can effectively replace and cost less than multiple single-processor computers delivering a server-room/IT "friendly" solution
3. Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by improving utilization of existing IT assets and IT staff efficiency.  The small hardware and software footprint of Rulerunner Quattro is less expensive than alternative virtualization solutions.

High-Performance Data Recognition

One of the most processor-intensive operations performed by Rulerunner is the conversion of machine printed or hand printed data with OCR and ICR technologies.

  
 
Rulerunner Quattro virtualization technology takes advantage
of dual and quad core servers for accelerated performance

You can run recognition on one to four simultaneous batches, depending on the licenses you have available.  You can get Rulerunner Quattro by itself and use licenses you already have. Even if you currently have one Rulerunner, Rulerunner Quattro virtualization can still help speed up processing. 

Imagine a system that has four background tasks:

1. Image pre-processing
2. Recognition
3. Validation
4. Export

By upgrading to Rulerunner Quattro, and without licensing any additional recognition engines, you can speed up processing by:

• Running Rulerunner Quattro on a dual-core machine where one processor does recognition, and the other processor performs Image processing, Validation, and Export at the same time as recognition
• Running on a quad-core (or dual processor, dual core) machine where each processor is responsible for one of the background tasks.

Either way, throughput and the “snappiness” of your system is greatly enhanced. You can also add additional recognition licenses, so that two or more processors are running recognition simultaneously.

Recognition Benchmark Results

One of the common complaints about multiprocessing architectures is that there is a lot of “overhead” that undermines the potential.  Can two processors inside a single computer really process as much as two separate computers?  Yes, because Rulerunner Quattro has been optimized in two ways:

1. to reduce the overhead in running rules themselves so that Rulerunner Quattro even on a single processor is faster than standard Rulerunner itself, and
2. the “threading” model in Rulerunner Quattro, i.e. the virtualization technology that allows it to take advantage of multiple processors, allows independent execution of simultaneous batches with no interdependency to drag performance down.

Benchmarking was performed for recognition using Taskmaster OCR/S and ICR/C.  The results showed that on a given computer under either engine, the speed improvement was approximately equal to the number of processors available.  Or think of it this way: in the time it normally takes to process one batch of documents, Rulerunner Quattro completes as many batches as there are processors available, up to four.

Rulerunner Quattro 1 Processor / Core: up to 1.3 times faster 2 Processors / Cores: up to 2.5 times faster 4 Processors / Cores: up to 4.4 times faster

Upgrade to Rulerunner Quattro

Contact Datacap for Rulerunner Quattro pricing.  Existing customers can license Rulerunner Quattro with no recognition engines using their existing engines.  If your needs are for processing more than four simultaneous batches contact Datacap for additional options.