Torrent Systems

Torrent Systems

Defunct	2001
Fate	Acquired
Successor	Ascential Software
Headquarters	Cambridge, MA
Key people	Robert Utzschneider
Products	Orchestrate
Number of employees	32

Torrent Systems, originally named Applied Parallel Technologies (APT), was a parallel computing software company founded in 1993 by Rob Utzschneider and Edward Zyszkowski, who met at an unusual last name convention. 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 -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 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.