Symposium spurs talk about emulators

OpenMPE, homestead talks show interest in remaining on platform

Armed with a set of HP’s intentions to help, the OpenMPE organization led a discussion about the future of projects to create HP 3000 hardware emulators. The two-hour meeting at the Valley Forge Solutions Symposium outdrew any other competing session on March 27 — an attendance pattern that was set one day earlier, when a talk on 3000 homesteading practices outdrew three migration-related talks.

Several customers at the OpenMPE meeting were finding out about the organization for the first time. But others in the room ran the full range of experience with the initiative that is working to create a future for the 3000 beyond HP’s involvement. HP put its first proposal for new MPE licenses into the community about a month before the Valley Forge meeting, a document whose language revolved around the phrase “HP intends” to support new licensing. Not long after the meeting started, HP’s Jeff Vance explained that the company’s proposal isn’t likely to get worded more strongly.

High-level HP executives view the OpenMPE-related plans — to foster the creation of an emulator, and use licensed MPE/iX on Intel-based systems — as “roadmap information,” according to Vance, “looking forward, so you’re not going to get any wording other than ‘we intend’ in the licensing proposal.” Vance said he drew up a first draft that used the phrase “HP plans,” only to see HP legal staff change the wording.

The only HP representative in the meeting, Vance also sits on the OpenMPE board. He said getting a higher level commitment above the HP 3000 business group — which calls itself “Virtual CSY” these days — would be problematic.

“It’s gone fairly high up in HP management,” Vance said of the effort on the license proposal. “The higher it goes up, the harder the battle is. It’s better not to have it go higher up.” Software vendors and some customers in the 3000 community are concerned that while the 3000 group in HP is as good as its word about the licenses, that group may not survive long enough to make good on its intentions in an HP that’s still shedding jobs through layoffs.

Vance said at the meeting that he’s working on notes to make the license transferability more relaxed in the HP proposal over the coming months.

Customers look at alternatives

Discussion of emulator projects had some sharp points during the meeting, as customers reported they need something to give them more time to make their transitions away from the HP era of 3000 supply and support. Robert Harris of Franklin Mutual Insurance said that an emulator couldn’t arrive too soon for his company.

“If you told me today there would be an emulator out by the end of October, I would say that’s a good option for me,” he said. “The longer it goes, and with another year of development, the customers’ decisions are already going to be made about what they’re doing.”

Homesteading strategies don’t have to include an emulator, since there’s ample HP 3000 hardware available in the used and HP authorized refurbished channel for years to come. Many customers who are staying with the system have their own custom applications to maintain, and some have large IT budgets they’re trying to reduce.

Dale Kennedy, a senior system consultant with Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield, said his company is looking at a project cost between $14 million and $42 million to move both its HP 3000 and IBM mainframe insurance applications to an IBM Unix server. The applications vary widely — the 3000 apps manage HMO business, which has more stringent capitation requirements, for example — but Anthem’s management wants to move both applications towards Facets, an AIX application on IBM hardware.

An emulator, Kennedy said, would give his company another alternative to reduce the cost of such a migration. While the company’s IT organizational issues around the migrations are being worked out, “we could be homesteading for a very long time,” he said.

Building cooperatively

Jon Backus, the chairman of the OpenMPE board, said that the organization may well be the owner of the HP 3000 emulator if no company can make a strong enough business case for building one. One emulator company, Allegro Consultants, has estimated the project will cost $1 million, a cost that would have to be made up by selling anywhere from hundreds to thousands of the products.

In a scenario where two or three companies try to sell emulators, not enough customers for any one company might keep any firm from proceeding. Backus outlined a concept where OpenMPE contracts with one or more of the companies — SRI and Strobe Data have also expressed interest — to build emulator software. OpenMPE would use dues from its membership to fund the contract, and then distribute the software to its members, while letting the contract engineering firms work on selling support as an aftermarket service.

In discussions with the three vendors, Backus reported that “none of the vendors were resistant to that concept. They didn’t say they would, but none of them said ‘absolutely not.’ Now you have a little less pressure in terms of trying to achieve critical mass. You have one emulator that has all the strengths of the companies.”

The design and objectives of the emulator concept got a good deal of air time in the meeting, as customers worked to understand how an emulator could stay current with changes in computing. HP’s Vance said the software to mimic HP 3000 hardware would be much easier to create than trying to duplicate the complexity of the operating system.

“An emulator is much simpler to prove in its correctness than something that tries to pretend it’s MPE,” Vance said. “It’s much harder to duplicate the behavior of MPE than to duplicate the behavior of the PA-RISC [3000] instruction set.”

HP’s line on its participation in such a project remains firm: it believes that moving away from the platform is the best course for its customers, although it recognizes a significant portion of the 3000 customer base won’t make the move soon. “HP would work with whoever is creating an emulator, to get them the resources from a knowledge standpoint to create an emulator,” Backus said.

A virtual lab

OpenMPE wants to create its own lab efforts through such collaboration, as well as contracting with individual programmers. The goal in this effort is to make a new version of MPE/iX beyond HP’s designs, a release that addresses bugs and even adds features beyond what HP will do for MPE/iX until 2006. Backus called this a “V-Lab,” and the concept needs HP to release its MPE/iX source code to a select group of V-Lab developers to make it happen.

HP has done this type of transfer already for another of its server operating environments, the RTE OS for the HP 1000s which the company no longer sells or supports.

OpenMPE has also been in contact with application and software providers (ISVs) now working in the 3000 community. In a conference call in early March, about 35 participants discussed potential issues in supporting an emulator project. “The most significant thing that came out of the call was ISVs being concerned with protecting their investments,” Backus said. HPSUSAN and HPCPUNAME variables protect most of the ISV software, and an emulator version of those variables looks essential to satisfying the concern of software providers in the emulator marketplace.

Emulation and elections

The OpenMPE organization announced the results of its board election at the Valley Forge meeting, returning all of its incumbents to new two-year seats. Directors Backus, Birket Foster, Ted Ashton and Mark Klein remain on the board.

Out of 300 mailing list members subscribed to the OpenMPE.org list, only 124 registered to vote in the election, and a total of 39 ballots decided the four board seats. Membership in OpenMPE is free, but customers and managers must fill out a one-page survey to gain the right to vote.

More interesting than the election results were questions about demand for an emulator, and the number of production systems served by the 39 voters. Details showed that one site in the OpenMPE membership has 102 HP 3000s and more than 20,000 users; the average number of systems used was closer to three for the rest of the membership that cast votes.

OpenMPE also asked voters to estimate how many copies of an emulator they want for the future, and came up with 258 orders from a total of 26 voting members. About one-third of the voters didn’t want any emulators; membership in the group doesn’t require ownership of an HP 3000, and both HP and consultants made up some of the voting members.

Backus said the concepts and plans before the OpenMPE board and its members can give the 3000 community the control over the future of the platform, with some cooperation on the source code issue.

“The most significant thing is that it allows the OpenMPE community to have complete control of their destiny,” he said of the V-Lab and source code release. “We would now own and maintain a best of breed emulator, and would control enhancements going forward to the operating system. We would be self-funded, and the community decides what happens, through system improvement ballots and elections. The community decides whether MPE lives or dies.”