In Summary

• Aries was created to help existing customers move their legacy environments and applications—the native applications that they were currently running—into the new Itanium world with a minimum of disruption.

• The Aries project began with three main challenges to overcome if binary compatibility was going to lead to seamless client transitions: reliability, usability, and performance.

• Aries could be considered a kind of virtual microprocessor. The benchmarking and testing of the system was robust.

• Since Aries is built into the current versions of HP's flavor of Unix^[29] (HP-UX), the operating system automatically detects PA-RISC applications and directs them to run under the control of the Aries system with complete transparency.

  ^[29] Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

• All IPF HP-UX releases will support applications that run on its companion PA HP-UX release. HP has performed benchmarks comparing the performance of applications running native on PA-RISC to that of the same applications running under Aries on Itanium-based systems of comparable performance.

• Testing has also shown that for many system-intensive applications, Aries and Itanium will deliver performance that is near to or equivalent to native performance on comparable PA-RISC systems.