Torrent Systems

Torrent Systems, originally named Applied Parallel Technologies (APT), was a parallel computing software company founded in 1993 by Rob Utzschneider and Edward Zyszkowski. Torrent is a success story for the NIST Advanced Technology Program,^[1] which provided much of the company's initial funding.

Products

The company's product was a parallel flow-based programming system called Orchestrate. The product enabled users to assemble a program using predefined components (called operators) connected by virtual datasets in a manner similar to Unix pipelines. Here is a simple example:

generator
  -records 50
  -schema record (recNum:    int32;
                  firstName: string[max=20];
                  lastName:  string[max=30];)
  |
peek
  -name -all

This script contains two operators: the generator operator (which creates test data) and the peek operator, which displayes the contents of the records it receives. The generator will create 50 records, each with three fields; the peek operator will display their contents.

Torrent was acquired by Ascential Software in late 2001^[2] for about $46 million; Orchestrate became a key part of Ascential's DataStage data integration system. When Ascential was subsequently acquired by IBM in mid-2005, DataStage became part of IBM's Information Server product. The Torrent technology lives on as the Parallel Engine that underpins IBM Information Server highly scalable architecture.

References