64-Bit Linux Spotlighted at Gelato ICE: Itanium® Conference & Expo
URBANA, Ill. (May 23, 2007)—Scientists, developers, and engineers from 56 companies and institutions convened from all around the globe for the April 2007 Gelato ICE: Itanium® Conference & Expo held in San Jose, California. The event was organized by the Gelato Federation, an international technical community dedicated to advancing Linux® on the Intel® Itanium® architecture. Conference sponsors included HP, Intel, and the Itanium® Solutions Alliance, and media sponsors HPCwire and GRIDtoday.
"It was amazing to see the enthusiastic exchange and collaborative spirit among developers, researchers, ISVs, and system vendors during this conference," said Mark K. Smith, Gelato managing director. "It was also interesting to see a shift in Gelato ICE attendees from mainly research/HPC institutions to over 60% hardware and independent software vendors. We hope to take advantage of this trend by focusing on mission-critical computing topics at future conferences."
Presentations and Cutting-Edge Projects Showcased
A major goal of the Gelato Federation is education, an area in which the April 2007 Gelato ICE excelled. Focused on areas such as virtualization, multi-core programming, GCC improvements, and techniques for software developers, the event delivered an exceptional speaker line-up and technical program with over 70 presentations.
The conference covered an excellent variety of pertinent topics for Itanium architecture all the way from a research viewpoint by Prof. Wen-mei Hwu at the University of Illinois to an end-user talk from Oracle's VP for Linux Engineering, Wim Coekaerts, to an industry analyst perspective from IDC VP Jean Bozman. Attendee favorites included keynotes on Linux kernel development for Itanium architecture by the Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer, Andrew Morton, and the Itanium processor vision and roadmap by Intel's James Fister.
Other highlights were a popular new track covering IA-64 Linux kernel work and two award ceremonies. One presented the Gelato Innovative Projects for Itanium Processors (IP)2 Award given to North Carolina State University for their research on hardware profile-guided automatic page placement for ccNUMA Systems. The other honored Clemens Roothaan (University of Chicago) with a Gelato Federation Lifetime Achievement Award for his pioneering work to advance the Itanium-based platform.
Presentations can be found at http://www.ice.gelato.org/about/apr07_index.php.
In addition to presenting, Gelato members—some of the world's top supercomputing centers, national labs, research centers, and universities—were able to highlight their current Linux/Itanium research during a poster session. Thirty-three member institutions presented over 100 projects, denoting a wide range of activities, including: virtualization work from the University of New South Wales as well as from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul; various compiler projects at the Russian Academy of Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Tsinghua University; and diverse scientific applications from the Riken Genomic Sciences Center, the Supercomputing Center of Galicia, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH).
Posters can be found at http://www.gelato.org/participants/member_posters.php.
Upcoming Events for the Gelato Federation
On June 5-8, Gelato will exhibit at GridAsia 2007. This is a major annual event, bringing together international researchers, practitioners, and industry players in grid computing.
In conjunction with Intel, Gelato will host a multi-core seminar at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, at 8:00am on June 26. This free four-hour seminar will cover essential concepts for programming on multi-core platforms. The seminar is architecture neutral. Following the seminar, Intel architecture-specific demonstrations will be offered. Details and registration information are available at http://www.supercomp.de/isc2007/index.php5?s=accevents.
With the tremendous amount of high-quality technical information delivered and critical mass of Linux and Itanium processor experts attending, the April 2007 Gelato ICE was a major success. The next Gelato ICE is set for October 1-2 at the Biopolis in Singapore. Stay tuned to http://www.ice.gelato.org/ for details.
About Gelato
The Gelato Federation is the global technical community dedicated to advancing Linux on the Intel Itanium-based platform through collaboration, education, and leadership. Gelato members are suppliers and users of Linux/Itanium processor technology with a shared goal of producing open-source solutions for academic, government, and industrial high-performance computing users. The Gelato portal serves as the primary channel for Federation business and collaborations. Information about Gelato members' software and solutions are available through the portal, and the community is welcome to participate and contribute.