At LinuxWorld 2005, IBM announced a really cool technologycalled Chiphopper. Now Chiphopper is all about taking two distributions ofLinux, SUSE and Red Hat and it came from IBM's engineering work to make thesetwo 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 littlex86 boxes and the P Series are based on the powerest PC and they're a littlebit bigger iron, and the Z Series, well, those are the big mainframes. Theseare the ones that have the big tapes and the big giant boxes and they take upglass houses and needs all sorts of air-conditioning. As it turns out, Red Hatand SUSE distributions of Linux run on all three of these.
Now how did IBM do that? Well, it's a bit of black art andmagic. They had to do all kinds of engineering work to make that happen, tomake this one run here, here and here, make Red Hat run there, and there andthere. And what they've done with Chiphopper, they've taken all thatengineering magic and they have bottled it up into one program and that programis for big software developers like, SAP and Oracle. And what they can do isthey can take their applications that they've developed to run on the x86hardware not just from IBM, but also from HP and Dell and those guys, and theycan use the porting tools, the Chiphopper porting tools to make that softwarerun without having to recode it all on the P Series and the E series and ZSeries mainframes. That makes life a lot easier for end-users who may want to outgrowthat 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 ESeries box, they could run it over here or if they want to go all the way thisbig giant mainframe, they can do it there too.
Now is this available to end-users who develop their owncustom software for their businesses, the little guys who are actuallycustomers of Oracle and SAP? As it turns out, not really. Their software couldrun across all of these, but if they want to Chiphop, Chiphop from the x86chip, the power PC chips, the mainframe chip, then what they have to do is theyhave to engage IBM's global services consultancy. Now speaking with ScottHandy, 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 theirown software so that they can do all the porting work themselves and they don'thave to go to IBM's global services to have them do it for them."
