by George Walsh

Whether your application is a computer game, a word processor, a Web server, or a high-capacity, high-performance set of sorting routines, taking advantage of the latest hardware is an absolute necessity in today's marketplace. Innovative Routines International (IRI) Inc. has a history of adapting its processor-intensive CoSORT* data sorting and extract-transform-load routines to run in every possible environment, making optimal use of each platform's raw capabilities. In striving to keep CoSORT in line with the most modern, up-to-date hardware, IRI is constantly faced with the challenge of gaining access to the newest processors, development tools, and support services.

This is the story of their latest experience with porting their software to Intel Corporation's 64-bit Itanium® processors.

IRI has literally decades of experience in adapting its applications to fit within the evolving hardware landscape. Founded in May 1978, IRI first offered its coroutine sort (CoSORT*) technology for CP/M-80 and CP/M-86 in 1980, MS-DOS* in 1982, UNIX* in 1985 and Win32* in 1995. Since that time, the company's CoSORT product has evolved into a series of multithreaded routines that offer one-pass data extraction, sorting, summarization, matching (joins), and reporting, with a special emphasis on providing high-speed sorting for databases and data warehouses. From mainframes to Windows*, from C to COBOL, from EBCDIC to ASCII, CoSORT has become a popular choice for both batch and interactive sorting needs, leveraging affordable symmetric multiprocessing hardware to parallelize sort services for nearly all applications developers. (See http://www.cosort.com/public/solutions/cosort/cosort.htm*.)

In June 2000, one of IRI's largest customers requested a 64-bit UNIX version of CoSORT on an unsupported platform — the Itanium processor — in order to exploit its unique Explicit Parallel Instruction Computing architecture and VLM, or Very Large Memory model. Having ported CoSORT to other new platforms in the past, IRI's managers know that accessibility to hardware, operating systems, and compilers would be a challenge. They expected to have to go through the usual song and dance of rounding up hardware and software to build and test the latest version of CoSORT — a process that generally added months to the software's delivery date.

"We were the first UNIX sorting package available back in 1985, so we have a history going back to before UNIX was even commercially relevant," says IRI's Business Development Vice President David Friedland. "Our original ports of CoSORT to different flavors of UNIX required either remote access or physical access to the machines, which could take weeks or even months to arrange, procure and/or set-up." The additional challenge of making sure the necessary operating system was coupled with the right hardware resources led IRI to believe that the development timeframe for the latest 64-bit port would be no different than it had been in the past. "It'd become increasingly difficult to find hardware OEMs providing ISVs with easy access to newer systems " Friedland says. Then, IRI was introduced to the Intel® Developer Services Intel® Software Partner Program.

The Intel Software Partner Program is a subscription service that gives developers access to new technology that includes Intel processors running on reference servers or workstations; the operating systems it supports; development tools; and technical assistance with porting or development issues. Thanks to its reputation as a company on the cutting edge of performance, IRI was one of the first companies Intel approached for the new Intel Software Partner Program; indeed, Intel Software Partner Program helped the company reduce the time it took to port CoSORT to its new environment to just a few days, instead of the weeks or months that were involved in previous porting efforts. IRI's experience in porting to other UNIX environments was certainly a contributing factor, but the reduction in the time it took to gain access to the hardware and software they needed to complete ports of their software, allowed IRI to bring the ported CoSORT application to market much faster than anticipated.

The targets were IBM's AIX* 5L, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX* and Debian's Linux* operating systems running on the new processor, which would be achieved with technical support from Intel. Ultimately, Intel provided IRI with its own Itanium-based servers and workstations for development and testing, as well as remote access to an Intel-hosted Itanium-based server running HP-UX version 11i. (See The HP Web site http://h20338.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/cache/324545-0-0-0-121.html* to learn more about HP-UX on the Itanium processor.)

"It's fair to say the ports to Itanium architecture only took a day or two once the hardware and software fell into place," Friedland says. "This compares very favorably to other ports we've done to other 32-bit and 64-bit UNIX flavors, as well as Windows. Intel Software Partner Program's provision of machine access and experts made for a very smooth transition of CoSORT's ANSI C code to the VLM model and Itanium architecture."

Another area where Friedland's team saw a tremendous advantage with the Intel Software Partner Program in the operating system and compiler installation, which he said is often a lengthy or costly proposition. So, too, are the learning curves associated with platform-specific libraries. However, Intel Software Partner Program gave IRI active assistance in its efforts toward porting CoSORT to run on the Itanium processor. Friedland even believes the program helped IRI improve the quality of the base code — the company maintains a common code base across all of its supported hardware and operating systems, handling platform-specific issues with includes and switches. "The speed with which we were able to bring everything up once the hardware and software were in place allowed us to spend less time focusing on porting and more time on benchmarking and testing," he says.

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