IBM's Chiphopper Tools to Help Build iSeries Apps

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At the spring LinuxWorld expo in Boston, IBM rolled out a new toolset for its independent software developer partners called Chiphopper, which allows companies to more easily code Linux applications that run across the X86, Itanium, and Power processors used in IBM's own eServer products. While the Chiphopper tools will not bolster the position of RPG and COBOL applications or the OS/400 operating system, they will bring more applications to the multi-platform iSeries server. This sure beats the alternative.

IBM's eServer platforms span quite a number of different chip architectures, including Xeon, Opteron, and Itanium processors in the xSeries line; PowerPC, Power4, and Power5 processors in the iSeries and pSeries servers; and the custom-made 31-bit and 64-bit processors in the zSeries mainframes. According to Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide Linux at IBM, the company's software engineers have been working with Novell and Red Hat to come up with a way to make it easier to make Linux applications that adhere to the Linux Standards Base 2.0 specification and then run them on Red Hat or Novell Linuxes on any of IBM's eServer platforms.

The idea behind Chiphopper is to give IBM's ISV partners a tool that lets them know that their code is LSB 2.0 compliant and also tell them where they make use of special hardware features in different X86, Itanium, Power, or mainframe platforms. With such a tool, ISVs can eventually create a single set of source code that can be compiled across all the different platforms, much as Red Hat and Novell do with their own commercial Linux distributions.

Handy says that IBM has about 37 percent revenue share in the Linux server business, ahead of Hewlett-Packard's 23 percent and Dell's 14 percent, and that one of the reasons why this is true is that it sells Linux on Power and mainframe platforms, which account for about 40 percent of its sales. To Handy's way of thinking, a tool like Chiphopper can help ISVs who have traditionally focused just in X86 servers to chase another 40 percent of incremental revenue on Power and mainframe servers. IBM has identified about 6,000 X86 Linux applications certified on the xSeries platform, and says that there are about 1,000 Power-Linux applications certified on the iSeries and pSeries. With Chiphopper, IBM wants to help double the number of xSeries-Linux applications to 12,000 (by about 2007 or so) and then work to get as many ported to the Power and mainframe platforms as possible. Handy says that IBM has been piloting the program with 24 ISVs.

The Chiphopper tool includes the LSB 2.0 App Check tool, for ensuring compliance to that spec; a tool called Hopscotch, created by IBM, that looks for chip-specific function calls in the code; as well as a "Ready for eServer" logo program that ISVs want. IBM is also offering ISVs free access to eServer platforms for application testing as well as co-marketing and sales coverage benefits to those participating in the Chiphopper program. Perhaps most significant, IBM is offering ISVs free post-production tech support for the code they port using Chiphopper.