Fate Acquired Key people Robert Utzschneider Successor Ascential Software Ceased operations 2001 | Defunct 2001 Products Orchestrate Number of employees 32 | |
Headquarters Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States | ||
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, 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 -allThis 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 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.