IBM's Chiphopper

At LinuxWorld 2005, IBM announced a really cool technology called Chiphopper. Now Chiphopper is all about taking two distributions of Linux, SUSE and Red Hat and it came from IBM's engineering work to make these two distributions of Linux run on all the different types of computers, the E Series, the P Series and the Z Series that IBM sells. Now, the E Series are the little x86 boxes and the P Series are based on the powerest PC and they're a little bit bigger iron, and the Z Series, well, those are the big mainframes. These are the ones that have the big tapes and the big giant boxes and they take up glass houses and needs all sorts of air-conditioning. As it turns out, Red Hat and SUSE distributions of Linux run on all three of these.

Now how did IBM do that? Well, it's a bit of black art and magic. They had to do all kinds of engineering work to make that happen, to make this one run here, here and here, make Red Hat run there, and there and there. And what they've done with Chiphopper, they've taken all that engineering magic and they have bottled it up into one program and that program is for big software developers like, SAP and Oracle. And what they can do is they can take their applications that they've developed to run on the x86 hardware not just from IBM, but also from HP and Dell and those guys, and they can use the porting tools, the Chiphopper porting tools to make that software run without having to recode it all on the P Series and the E series and Z Series mainframes. That makes life a lot easier for end-users who may want to outgrow that E Series x86 computer, want to move upscale to some bigger iron from IBM. Now they could take the same software that they were running on Linux on the E Series box, they could run it over here or if they want to go all the way this big giant mainframe, they can do it there too.

Now is this available to end-users who develop their own custom software for their businesses, the little guys who are actually customers of Oracle and SAP? As it turns out, not really. Their software could run across all of these, but if they want to Chiphop, Chiphop from the x86 chip, the power PC chips, the mainframe chip, then what they have to do is they have to engage IBM's global services consultancy. Now speaking with Scott Handy, who is the Chief of IBM's worldwide Linux operation, and he said that, "Maybe one day these folks up here will be able to run Chiphopper on their own software so that they can do all the porting work themselves and they don't have to go to IBM's global services to have them do it for them."