Torrent Systems


Torrent Systems, originally named Applied Parallel Technologies, was a parallel computing software company founded in 1993 by Rob Utzschneider and Edward Zyszkowski. Torrent received initial funding from the NIST Advanced Technology Program.

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 connected by virtual datasets in a manner similar to Unix pipelines. Here is a simple example:

generator
 -records 50
 -schema record 
 |
peek
 -name -all

This script contains two operators: the generator operator 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 part of Ascential's DataStage data integration system, which became part of IBM's Information Server product when Ascential was acquired by IBM in mid-2005. Torrent technology became the Parallel Engine in the Information Server architecture.