Transitive Gets Backing from Intel for Porting Product

Published: March 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

About 18 months ago, an unknown software startup called Transitive launched a product called QuickTransit, which allows operating systems and applications that were designed for one computing architecture to be run, without changes, on another architecture. Last summer, Transitive broke onto the scene when Silicon Graphics chose it to support Irix Unix applications created for MIPS servers on its Linux-Itanium Altix machines, and then was made famous when Apple used QuickTransit at the heart of the Rosetta environment that allowed it to quickly move from PowerPC to Intel processors.

Having benefited indirectly from these two deals, Intel has woken up to the possibilities of what a technology like QuickTransit can do to bolster Intel's competitive position, and because of this, the company announced this week that it would be funding the development of QuickTransit variants. Rather than take a stake in QuickTransit, says Bob Wiederhold, president and CEO at Transitive, Intel is paying to create and enhance support for specific platform emulation on its own Itanium and Xeon platforms. Wiederhold is not at liberty to say what hardware and operating system combinations Intel wants to target. But it isn't all that hard to guess.

There are currently four flavors of the QuickTransit emulation software. QuickTransit for Itanium supports MIPS, Power/PowerPC, X86, and mainframe binaries; QuickTransit for Opteron supports MIPS, Power/PowerPC, and mainframe binaries; QuickTransit for X86 supports MIPS, Power/PowerPC, and mainframe binaries; QuickTransit for Power/PowerPC supports MIPS, X86, and mainframe binaries. QuickTransit has three key parts: a front end where the binaries written for one platform (say AIX on Power) reside and a back end that links to the new platform (say Linux on Itanium). Sitting between this front end and back end is an optimizer layer that translates blocks of instructions in the AIX-Power application into an intermediate form, which Transitive calls intermediate representation, or IR. The optimizer, as the name suggests, performs optimizations on these blocks of instructions and stores these routines in the cache of the server, in this case the Linux-Itanium box. The optimizer then encodes the binaries for the new target environment and handles all of the operating system and graphics mapping calls, which allows the application to run. QuickTransit can support any operating system that is Unix-like or Linux-like as a source application platform and move it to any other Unix-like or Linux-like platform. QuickTransit can also move any applications (including the operating systems) that run on IBM mainframes to a Unix or Linux platform.

In the announcement that the two companies put out at Intel Developer Forum, Kirk Skaugen, general manager of the server unit of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel, said that there was customer demand to move off RISC platforms to Itanium architectures, and while the announcement said the two were working on products that would support both Xeon and Itaniumn platforms as targets, Skaugen was trying to pump up Itanium as the obvious alternative to RISC platforms, which predominantly run Unix but which also support a few proprietary platforms like OS/400 or OpenVMS.

You'll notice that the Sparc processor from Sun Microsystems is not on that list of emulated platforms, and neither is Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC or Alpha processors. By targeting MIPS, mainframes, and Power platforms, Transitive positioned itself to help Apple make the move to Intel chips and dump IBM and Freescale, and has helped SGI preserve some key Irix accounts that want to move to Altix gear but cannot afford to port their Irix applications. In both cases, paying a slight performance penalty is nothing compared to the cost, time, and grief associated with porting applications. With Sun still having the largest Unix installed base in the world, getting support for Sparc binaries in QuickTransit is obviously what Intel and Transitive are up to, even if the two companies will not cop to it. But it could turn out that Intel and HP are interested in emulating PA-RISC and Alpha binaries as well. If the performance penalties are not too high, being able to run emulated binaries might be easier for OpenVMS and HP-UX customers than actually porting their applications, even if HP has already ported these two operating systems to the box. And there might be a big benefit to HP if Tru64 Unix on Alpha binaries could be emulated on Itanium. Tru64 Unix customers were kinda left out in the cold by HP's acquisition of Compaq.

While Intel wanted to talk about QuickTransit on Itanium in the announcement, for many customers using RISC/Unix platforms, Intel's future Core architecture products in the Xeon family are much more desirable in terms of their performance and thermal properties than the Itanium chips, regardless of the reliability and scalability benefits that Itanium has.

All that Wiederhold would confirm about his company's plans with Intel is that the two are working on support for more RISC chip-operating system combinations than the current QuickTransit line supports. "Intel is going to proactively promote the resulting products, and this deal is a strong endorsement of our product." He says that the new QuickTransit products will be available before the end of the year. Intel is providing "a substantial amount of funding" for the development of the new QuickTransit variations as well as key access to Intel engineers to ensure that QuickTransit runs well on the new Core chips as well as Itanium processors. Intel is also going to be promoting the use of QuickTransit to its 100,000-strong ISV channel.

What Intel has not done as part of its formalized relationship with Transitive--and what it should seriously consider doing--is making the emulation of RISC/Unix and proprietary platforms on its Xeon and Itanium processors a standard platform feature, much as TCP/IP and XML acceleration are part of the platform. Why not? Imagine if every Intel-based server was capable of doing such a function and, for instance, the Opteron processors from AMD were not. Would that be a differentiator for a lot of customers? Would that increase the tendency to adopt Intel platforms and do server consolidation? The answer to that question is probably yes.

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