ruane_d@apollo.uucp (05/01/87)
APOLLO SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT TAPS POWER OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING April 27 -- As a follow-up to its recent advances in the area of Network Computing, Apollo today announced major enhancements to its industry leading DSEE software package to enable it to utilize the parallel computing power of Apollo's distributed workstation network environment. DSEE III, Domain Software Engineering Environment, version 3, manages large- scale development projects involving teams of managers, software engineers, and technical writers. With DSEE III, a network of Apollo workstations becomes a powerful software development environment, offering comprehensive support for complex, team projects involving as much as several million lines of code. Software developed and managed under DSEE III can be written to run on any target system, including workstations, PCs, minicomputers, mainframes, and embedded microprocessor systems. DSEE III taps excess CPU cycles of an Apollo workstation network to dramatically reduce the most compute-intensive component of software development -- system building -- by up to fourteen times. For very large projects, system building that would otherwise take days on a single CPU is reduced to hours with DSEE III's unique concurrent build feature. In addition, DSEE III features a new open architecture design to enable end-users and software vendors to integrate it with software products used in other phases of the software development process, such as specification and design tools or project management applications. "First introduced in 1984, DSEE has played a key role in Apollo's rapid penetration of the CASE market. In only three years of active pursuit of CASE business, Apollo has captured over 25% of the total workstation software development market," said Steven Brand, Apollo's Market Segment Manager for CASE. "As the flagship of our CASE product line, DSEE has been the critical advantage in helping Apollo win new CASE customers in many highly competitive sales situations." One of Apollo's major wins in the CASE marketplace influenced by DSEE was a 134- workstation contract with the Software Productivity Consortium, a group of 14 leading aerospace and electronics companies involved in joint software development projects. "With DSEE III, Apollo's strength in distriubted networking technology and open systems architecture has been brought to bear on one of its most successful software products. The ultimate winners of these enhancements are the companies involved in large-scale software systems development," said Brand. Earlier this year, Apollo launched the Network Computing concept, an approach to computing in which users can run a single application across a network of computers, taking advantage of available specialized compute servers and other computing resources. Apollo designed DSEE III to take full advantage of its distributed computing environment, allowing users to utilize excess CPU cycles on a network of Apollo workstations. Using its new concurrent build feature, DSEE III looks at a list of eligible workstations (up to 1,000) and finds up to 20 of the most idle nodes. It examines the DSEE System Model to figure out how to divide the build into parallel pieces. The System Model contains a description of the hierarchical dependencies of all the modules that make up the system. The modules that can be built in parallel are then demand-paged across the network to server nodes, where they can be compiled. The completion status of each process and the resulting object modules are demand-paged back to the controlling workstation. DSEE III's open architecture gives engineers using other software tools -- such as graphical specification, design tools, and project management tools -- access to all DSEE functions and database information. This open architecture design permits users to customize their environments, using graphical windowing systems such as Domain/Dialogue -- Apollo's own user-interface design and management software -- and the X Window System -- an emerging industry standard. And DSEE's open database lets users develop custom generated reports to measure progress as projects proceed.