Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was founded in 1965 as Pacific Northwest Laboratory to perform reactor and fuel research and development for the federal government’s Hanford, Washington nuclear facility. An important early development was vitrification, the process that stabilizes hazardous waste in glass for thousands of years. Subsequently, NASA chose PNNL to analyze lunar material collected from the Apollo program. PNNL also developed the critical technology that makes compact discs and disc players work. Other PNNL projects encompass areas from environmental protection, national security, health and manufacturing to high-performance computing and advanced materials.

PNNL moves beyond IMAGE.

For much of PNNL’s history, an HP 3000 system handled the production load. Now, with the promise of new functionality provided by open systems, PNNL wanted to migrate to Oracle/Unix. Because the legacy system is still operating, PNNL decided on a phased approach. As a result, they needed a way to provide bi-directional communication between the systems. Jeff Brown, Applications Manager for PNNL and technical lead on the migration project, discussed his dilemma. “We had new applications in Oracle on HP/UX that supplemented or replaced old applications on HP 3000 IMAGE. But some of the old applications were still actively in production, and they contained data relevant to the new processes that were not yet running in Oracle. We had to ensure that our business rules for processing data were complied with.”

Call again. Every 2 minutes.

Mr. Brown’s solution was to create a script in PERL running as a Unix process. This process wakes up every two minutes to look for work. The process invokes a script written in Taurus Software’s Warehouse data movement language. This script is executed by the Warehouse data movement engine that accesses the local Oracle instance as well as communicating with the Warehouse data movement engine on the HP 3000. 

The functional process follows. First, Warehouse consults an Oracle application log for transactions that are ready to be processed against the HP 3000 IMAGE data. Next, for each transaction, Warehouse reads the necessary Oracle supporting data, maps that data to IMAGE structures and queries IMAGE through the remote Warehouse engine on the HP 3000. This remote Warehouse engine returns either an approval or a denial. The Warehouse engine performs all the necessary data type translations and data validations. In the end, a transaction flagged as completed allows follow-on activities to proceed. The bi-directional real-time ability provided by Warehouse enabled timely activity and a guarantee of both source and target application integrity.

Asked whether the project was as gargantuan as it sounds, Mr. Brown replied, “The process was extremely complex with thousands of lines of code. It took 12 man weeks, and I was the only person working on the interfacing part of the project. But Warehouse was up to the task. Warehouse helped handle all the data movement efficiently and easily.”

No man is an island.

Mr. Brown did have some help, though. Because he used the Warehouse FUNCTION command extensively, he pushed Warehouse to its limits in that area. “I called on Taurus Tech Support a lot,” Brown said. “They were always polite, caring and able to quickly reproduce problems and get back to me. One particular issue was intractable, but they stuck with it until they identified the problem and fixed it."

Now the work is done, the application has been in use for a year and is working successfully. The preliminary estimate for completion of migration is sometime in 2002. What could have been a major obstacle has turned out to be just another step in the Phased Migration.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) at Richland, WA., delivers breakthrough science and technology to help the solve complex problems in environment, energy, national security and health.