Torrent Systems

Torrent Systems, originally named Applied Parallel Technologies, was a parallel computing software company founded in 1993 by Rob Utzschneider and Ed Zyszkowski. The company's major 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.