Putting cutting edge hardware and software tools in the hands of developers provides benefits beyond simply speeding a product to market. First, by working directly with a hardware vendor like Intel, application developers have access to experts who can not only answer questions about the new hardware, but are in a position to locate or even create tools that facilitate the software development effort. For example, optimization tools that were previously only available for the Windows* platform could be made available for other environments if the demand from developers were high enough.

In addition, having access to the latest tools and processors can give application developers insight into how well upcoming hardware fares against its competitors. Realizing that certain optimizations and hardware capabilities improve performance dramatically can lead to a reevaluation of the platform that a vendor recommends to its customers. In the case of CoSORT, for example, IRI found that the application ran substantially faster on a four-way Itanium-based server running the Debian Linux distribution than they had observed on a similarly configured RISC-based system — a potentially valuable piece of information for its customers. With execution time for sorting a 1GB file (consisting of 750-byte records) dropping from 7 minutes and 24 sec to 1 minute and 57 seconds (a 2.8X speedup) on a recent port, there's no doubt that IRI's customers will be happy with its version of CoSORT for Itanium Architecture.

Keeping the customer happy, of course, is the goal of both software and hardware developers, and IRI is no exception. "Porting CoSORT's file sorting, reporting, and ETL software to Intel's Itanium-based platform was essential to our data center and data warehousing customers," Friedland says. "With the aid of Intel Developer Service's Intel® Software Partner Program, CoSORT can now leverage VLM and 64-bit technology to satisfy the high-volume processing demands of our end-user and application development markets." When hardware and software do what customers expect them to do, everybody wins.

George Walsh is a veteran technical editor and writer with experience in fields ranging from embedded systems programming to CAD. As a freelance researcher and writer he has provided his expertise to clients in a wide variety of markets.

* Intel provides Internet links in this document as a convenience to its customers. The linked sites are independent of Intel and Intel does not warrant and cannot be responsible for their contents.