  The US National Gemini Office (US NGO), part of the Community Science and
Data Center (CSDC) at NSF's NOIRLab, has completed a project to upgrade the
IRAF-based Gemini reduction software to provide a fully supported system
capable of running natively on modern hardware. This work includes 64-bit
platform ports of the GEMINI package and dependency tasks (e.g. from the STSDAS
external package), upgrades to the core IRAF system and all other external
packages to fix any platform and licensing problems, and the establishment of
fully supported Help Desk and distribution systems for the user community.
Early results show a 10-20X speedup of execution times using the native 64-bit
software compared to the virtualized 32-bit solutions now in use. Results are
even better on new Apple M1/M2 platforms where the additional overhead of Intel
CPU emulation can be eliminated. Timing comparisons, science verification
testing, and release plans are discussed.
