Customers at the latest IPROF MPE developer’s conference asked HP if its next-decade commitments were blocking more pressing needs. HP managers replied that its HP 3000 IA-64 commitment stands — but it’s not standing in the way of engineering that will be delivered much sooner.

Dave Wilde, the R&D Section Manager for the Commercial Systems Division (CSY) whose engineers lead the growth-based work, put it bluntly: IA-64 is important, but it’s not CSY’s main focus today.

“If you look at where we’re investing in CSY right now, we’re very focused on moving to next-generation platforms,” Wilde said, “which is well in advance of what we need to do for IA-64.

“We’re working with the lab on building blocks for IA-64,” he added. “Frankly, IA-64 is not a big area of focus for us.”

Wilde said HP has immediate projects underway in the areas of capacity, scaling, and changes in the IO subsystem “to move along with the rest of the HP train in terms of platforms. The analogy we use when we look at what we do in CSY is that we draft off the larger HP investment in platforms, compilers, peripherals and networking.”

The discussion at IPROF on CSY’s IA-64 emphasis began when developers and customers questioned how much bandwidth the new architecture might be taking from other enhancement requests. “When our customers need IA-64, then we’ll make it available,” said R&D lab manager Winston Prather. “That will allow us to use our resources on shorter-term projects.”

A lack of information about the new architecture was also frustrating to a few. HP 3000 developers are “the last group of programmers in the world who will get technical information about the IA-64 instruction set,” according to Stan Sieler, a developer at Allegro Consultants.

Wilde replied that HP will share information about IA-64, but it hasn’t had much in the way of demand for it. “We frankly have not been getting a lot of requests yet from customers and partners for this kind of information,” Wilde said.

“Having said that, if there are people that need information on IA-64, we certainly would be happy to work with our customers and partners who think they need that,” he added. “We can look at what we need to do to get that available. Feel free to talk with me or send me an e-mail message.” Wilde’s e-mail address is dave_wilde@hp.com.

The current work that is slowing HP’s other enhancement projects isn’t based around IA-64, but the prelude to it: engineering for the PA-8500 HP 3000s, which will be able to handle both PA-RISC and IA-64 architectures.

“We’re identifying and building the building blocks we need,” Wilde said. “We’re starting to get to the point to identify the long lead-time items for IA-64 — like object code translation; handling compatibility mode; starting to think about what we need to do for compiler investments. We ourselves haven’t been spending that much time yet looking in detail at the whole IA-64 space.”

SIGIMAGE chair Ken Sletten suggested at the meeting that HP “CSY Management consider putting more resources on current needs, even at the cost of reducing the PA-RISC to IA-64 overlap. While perhaps no one single thing stands out as a make or break item, the collective basket of current needs is higher priority than getting MPE on IA-64 as quickly as possible.”

Wilde replied that HP is investing in “a ton of things,” adding that “with a few long lead time exceptions, those things are not IA-64. The things we are investing in heavily are next-generation PA-RISC based platforms, capacity and scaling, network links, a large set of datacenter management enhancements in the area of storage management, high availability and enterprise system management. There are also a lot of things we are doing in the area of Internet and interoperability.”

In a later summary of its work on languages, HP showed much of its earliest work for IA-64 is in the language labs. Pam Bennett, a CSY R&D lab section manager whose responsibility includes development tools, said “The Roseville team is looking at compilers and where we could go with those.” Randy Roten, the R&D project manager in HP’s Software Support Division at Roseville, said much of his team’s work revolves around IA-64.

“The primary thing we are doing today and what is taking most of our bandwidth is focusing on the move to IA-64,” Roten said. “We happen to be one of those areas that has long lead-time activities, and we are beginning to work on those.”

Roten said the work on languages wasn’t exclusively on HP COBOL, but generally applied to HP 3000 compilers. The language labs appeared to be the one area where HP was putting PA-RISC enhancements behind preparations for IA-64. “We’re moving ahead to Merced, not PA-RISC,” Roten said. “It’s possible along the way there will be work to do on the PA-RISC side as well. We are potentially part of some of the performance gains [CSY is planning].”

Roten’s group has a new dotted-line report to the CSY managers to better synchronize engineering efforts. “Part of the really good news is that we’re really hooked into CSY’s processes now,” Roten said. “I am in staff meetings with CSY management and it’s really helping us to keep in sync. That wasn’t happening in the past.”