Torrent Systems, originally named Applied Parallel Technologies (APT), was a parallel computing software company founded in 1993 by Edward Zyszkowski, with the first employee being Rob Utzschneider. Torrent received initial funding from the NIST Advanced Technology Program.[1]
Products
The company's 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 displays 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[2] for about $46 million; Orchestrate became part of Ascential's