“We have indeed started an R&D project to emulate an HP e3000 model,” Boers said. “We have an existing emulator ‘engine’ with which we emulate PDP-11s, several different VAX systems and customer-specific architectures. We will use parts of the existing designs.” Boers said that SRI’s approach to the project means that “Designing an emulator starts with collecting detailed descriptions of the hardware components to be emulated. Coding them up, and using the hardware diagnostics to test the components, is relatively easy when the hardware documentation is very detailed. It is a background job, essentially for our own interest, and we do not plan to communicate progress on it for now.”

SRI isn’t making any statements yet about whether its R&D work can move on to become a product, one available to HP 3000 customers who want to shift their MPE-IMAGE applications away from HP’s PA-RISC 3000s — and change little else. Boers said a year ago that “we would not develop a product until there are companies willing to test and buy the product. We learned from the PDP-11 and VAX emulators that replacement is a lengthy process. In my opinion developing a hardware board or a system call emulator is much more costly and takes longer than developing a hardware abstraction layer.”

Such an abstraction product, which intercepts software calls made to the PA-RISC instruction set and re-routes them to the Pentium or Itanium instruction set, is at the heart of both SRI’s project and the designs discussed by Allegro Consultants’ vice president Gavin Scott. Boers said that the company’s standard VAX 3600 emulator “runs at about five times the speed of a hardware VAX 3600 on an AMD 2000+ system, and probably gets 30 percent faster every year. But the 3600 is a slow system, compared to current [VAX] technology.” That 30 percent figure is an interesting goal for performance: HP stuck with a 30 percent per year speed improvement for the HP 3000 line from 1997 through its last design release in 2001.

Competition between several emulator makers won’t keep the SRI prototype from advancing. What’s more, the company doesn’t seem to need any advance commitment of funding to proceed with this first step of making an emulator. Boers said SRI planned to proceed with its R&D work “irrespective of license agreements or competition. Hardware emulators are ‘bread and butter’ stuff for us, and we certainly will not need — nor are interested in — development funding. Volume distribution of a prototype is probably the only way to find out if a product’s market really exists.”

SRI was founded by engineering talent well-versed in VAX designs, much like Allegro is built around engineers who have worked from the ground floor up on PA-RISC. SRI has already been through a licensing negotiation with Compaq to get the VAX’s OpenVMS operating system software cleared for use on its PC-based emulator. “Based on the precedent created with Compaq I am not too concerned about the outcome of the software licensing” for MPE/iX, Boers said. “But that process might take longer than the development. We might have a small prototype by fall of this year. If it works well enough, we might show it in public. Any discussion or decision about a possible product is premature until that moment.”

Commercial viability of the project remains to be determined. “We have not looked at commercial viability, nor at the implications of an emulator on software aspects like licensing of components,” Boers said. “That is in effect beyond the current R&D scope of building a software model of a HP e3000 hardware system. If we get to a presentable prototype we will consider what and when to do next.” SRI said it received word that HP examined the SRI OpenVMS license when HP made up its mind about licensing MPE/iX for emulators. Compaq actually agreed to support OpenVMS on the SRI emulator as it would for any VAX-based VMS, once the SRI emulator had passed Compaq’s tests, Boers added. The initial terms of HP’s license seem acceptable for SRI. “A one time (relatively low) fee to run MPE/iX on an emulator looks very reasonable to me,” Boers said.