Porting Makes Sense for Many
Given these hardware-based advantages, scientific and technical users have adopted Itanium 2-based systems where the huge gains in floating-point performance and scalability found immediate application in the sequencing of genomes, quantum physics, weather modeling, and other computationally-intensive settings. Currently, the biggest challenges for these users are migrating custom applications from one platform to another as well as reorganizing enormous datasets to better exploit parallelism.
In the past few years enterprise business computing has grown exponentially more analytical, data structures more vast and user populations more immense. The tipping point for Itanium 2-based systems to move out of high-performance computing labs and into the general business community is past. For both scientific and commercial users, the availability of off-the-rack software optimized for Itanium 2-based systems is hardly an issue today. More than 7000 applications now run natively on the Intel Itanium 2 processor with more arriving all the time.
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The 64-bit Tipping Point: What's Different on Intel Itanium 2 Microarchitecture?
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While the market is large and growing, not every software vendor needs to port; Itanium 2-based hardware serves the upper end of the computer market. Those who market applications for business intelligence, database management, computer-aided engineering, process simulation, complex imaging or similarly power-hungry functions stand to profit from the expanding user base of the Intel Itanium 2 microarchitecture.
System manufacturers and OEMs are the final piece of the porting puzzle. The Intel Itanium 2 processor is not limited to a single hardware platform. Many manufacturers including Bull, Hitachi, HP, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Fujitsu, NEC, SGI and Unisys use it in high-end servers. Anyone manufacturing hardware using Itanium 2-based systems needs to consider porting issues, particularly with regard to drivers which can be tricky to migrate from one system to another.
While the proliferation of porting tools makes the process easier (in some cases almost trivial), migrations must be planned as carefully as any other major IT effort. Operating systems, hardware, availability of code, programming language, the need to port device drivers, cross-platform communication and security are all important considerations.
