Project will be developed further, after being successfully tested on Photoshop's image filter system

Jan 4, 2016 13:16 GMT  ·  By

Adobe and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have teamed up for Project Helium, an initiative to help developers update older software for modern-day hardware.

Software rot, also called bit-rot, is a term used to describe software that was abandoned by its creator or was not updated to support the latest hardware specifications on which it runs.

It is a common problem, not only for abandoned or neglected open source projects, but also for bigger, closed-source, or commercial projects, including Adobe's famous Photoshop editor.

As Photoshop's source code grew, Adobe found it became harder and harder to keep all of the software's features optimized for the latest advancements in CPU and GPU hardware.

Since keeping this codebase requires many developers and even more hours of labor, the company started to look into alternative solutions for code optimization operations.

Project Helium was successfully tested with Adobe Photoshop

Joining forces with MIT, the two started Project Helium, a tool that will analyze source code, and based on a set of rules, optimize and even rewrite and recompile source code for newer hardware specifications and capabilities.

At this stage, Project Helium is only a proof of concept and has only been used in tests that were specifically created to optimize source code used in image processing software.

In Adobe's tests, Project Helium has been able to speed up the process of applying filters on top of an image in Photoshop with up to 75%.

"We wanted to see if we could solve the problem of bit-rot," says Sylvain Paris, principal research scientist at Adobe. "We wanted to automate the process of keeping software up-to-date."

Adobe and MIT researchers say that theoretically, Project Helium can be used for any type of code, targeting both desktop and Web environments, and regardless of the programming language it was written in.