Aries emulation on Itanium

[Tim Medford]

Hoping to upgrade from PA-RISC to Itanium in Q1 2007. All of our software has been certified on Itanium with one exception (Some 3rd party version control software agent).

From what I understand both 32-bit and 64-bit PA-RISC software will run on Itanium under the Aries emulator. Has anyone had luck with this good or bad? This particular software is not mission-critical, but nonetheless important.

I suppose I could keep those VC agents on RISC and open up a samba or nfs share over to the production itanium server.

Thanks,
Tim

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The ARIES emulator works quite well and should be invisible to your application. You should be aware that you will take about a 3X performance hit compared to native code -- of the portion of your process that is actually waiting on the CPU. Because many UNIX applications are i/o rather than cpu bound, your actual overall performance impact may be very small. In fact, if you are migrating from a slower, older PA-RISC environment, even the 3X CPU throughput hit may be completely negated by the faster hardware.

[Arijit]

Actually, the performance hit on CPU SPECint2000 is just 25%-50% (compared with PA8800 based machines) with the latest ARIES patch (PHSS_35045).

There are multiple very large multi-tier application stacks deployed on Integrity using ARIES technology including 3-tier database architectures (here the Middle-Ware is on ARIES while the DB is native).

Visit the site www.hp.com/go/aries and you can get information or post any specific queries.