Gelato Federation Meetings Showcase Advances in Linux-Itanium HPC

More than 90 representatives of 30 different Gelato Federation Member institutions and corporations met at the University of Illinois May 24-26, 2004, to review and exchange research advances for Linux on the Intel Itanium® 2 platform. Gelato is the global research community dedicated to advancing the Linux Itanium platform through collaborative relationships targeting real-world problems and solutions. The 2-1/2 day meeting, hosted by Gelato founding members NCSA and the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory, was the largest in the Federation’s history, as well as the first held in the USA since Gelato was launched in early 2002.

Twenty-eight scientific presentations by top research and industry users of Linux on Itanium focused on high-performance computing issues and collaborative solutions among member institutions. The program also included a full day of meetings for Gelato’s technology focus groups (Clusters and Grids, Parallel File Systems, and Box Scalability) and opportunities to interact informally with representatives from Hewlett-Packard, Intel, SGI, TopSpin Communications, Cluster File Systems Inc., LinuxHPC.org, and others.

Program highlights included updates from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on deployment of the 54TB Lustre filesystem on their HP Integrity rx2600 Itanium 2 cluster with a Quadrics interconnect, which is ranked #5 in the TOP500 supercomputers. The Bioinformatics Institute of Singapore, whose Itanium 2 system is used for biomedical research, presented important work in applications such as cell signaling, molecular dynamics simulations, and biological network models for signal transduction pathways. NCSA presented current work on deployment of hardware and software for the TeraGrid project on the Itanium architecture, as well as the Virtual Machine Interface, a high-performance communication middleware, with the MPICH implementation layered on top. From the University of New South Wales (Australia) came performance news on a user-mode gigabit Ethernet driver and the user mode IDE driver, as well as progress reports on a new page table format and superpage support. The presentations are available at the Gelato portal (www.gelato.org).

Recent Gelato Member software research was also reviewed, including Buster, a portable debugger for PVM/MPI programs on IA-64 clusters, from Tsinghua University (China); and Q-syscollect, a performance tool from HP that non-intrusively gathers system-wide call graph and call count data. From the University of Illinois came advances in the research compiler, OpenIMPACT, including a new multi-file optimization environment and a new pointer analysis system. Links to the software are available on the Gelato portal, www.gelato.org.

New Gelato Members were introduced, including IHPC, the Institute for High-Performance Computing (Singapore); the University of Houston; Purdue University; UC-Berkeley; South China University of Technology; and the Research Institute of Bioinformatics and Molecular Design (Korea). In addition, the Gelato Federation announced its membership in the Free Standards Group, with whom the Federation is working to contribute to the IA-64 Linux Standards Base (LSB) specification.

About Gelato The Gelato Federation is a worldwide consortium of diverse research organizations who come together as an open-source community of suppliers and users of Linux Itanium technology. Gelato’s mission is to enable the adoption of Linux on Itanium by producing scalable, open-source, Linux-based Intel Itanium Processor Family computing solutions for academic, government, and industrial HPC research. Federation business and collaborations are conducted through the Gelato portal, www.gelato.org. All Gelato Members’ software and solutions are available through the portal, and the HPC community is welcome to participate and contribute through the portal. For more information, contact Mark K. Smith, managing director, at mksmith@gelato.org.

Contact: Laurie Talkington talkngtn@gelato.org