The Itanium® Solutions Alliance today announced a $100,000 sponsorship of the Gelato Federation, a global technical community dedicated to the advancement of Linux on Intel® Itanium® architecture. The partnership will strengthen the community of support for Itanium® 2-based platforms and open source through research, education, development and improvement of Linux on the Intel Itanium processor.

Through this sponsorship, the Alliance is collaborating with Gelato to expand Itanium Solutions Alliance enabling programs, like Alliance Developer Days and the Solutions Center Network, to increase the opportunity for software developers to migrate their applications to Itanium-based platforms. To support these efforts, a software developer track is being offered at the Gelato ICE: Itanium® Conference & Expo, April 15-18 in San Jose, Calif. The session covers essential elements of hardware and performance analysis, enabling developers to optimize software performance on the Intel Itanium processor. Gelato ICE features more than 70 technical presentations over several tracks, including: multi-core programming, virtualization, IA-64 Linux kernel, compilers, research and enterprise.

The Solution Center Network, a collaborative network of global centers to facilitate the remote porting and optimization of applications to the Intel Itanium 2 processor, aligns well with Gelato’s Coconut and Vanilla projects, which provide access to Itanium-based hardware and guidance on porting and tuning Linux Itanium open-source applications. The objective of the Gelato Coconut project is to provide users with availability to production, pre-production and simulated Itanium-based hardware. Applications ported through Gelato Vanilla, a project to increase availability of highly-optimized binaries for critical Linux utilities on the Itanium-based platform, will be listed in the Itanium Solutions Alliance Solutions Catalog on the Alliance Website, http://www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org .

“We are very pleased to partner with the Itanium Solutions Alliance. Working together we can build and strengthen the global community of users, developers and vendors for the Itanium platform,” said Mark K. Smith, the Gelato Federation’s managing director. “Gelato brings access to research, open-source and HPC technical communities, and can help expand the Alliance presence in key geographical regions including South America, Southeast Asia and Russia. Gelato and the Itanium Solutions Alliance have complementary objectives and the same mission: to accelerate the adoption of Itanium.”

The Itanium Solutions Alliance also provided funding for improvements to optimize the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for Intel Itanium architecture, specifically superblock scheduling work being completed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), one of Gelato's founding members. This enhancement allows optimizations to be performed over larger blocks of code. Other strategic areas of the Gelato GCC work include alias analysis, instruction scheduling and data prefetching. Ultimately, this project will lead to an improved GCC that produces faster running code for Intel Itanium 2 processors in shorter compilation times.

About The Itanium Solutions Alliance

The Itanium Solutions Alliance was formed in 2005 by leading enterprise and technical solutions providers to work together towards a common objective of transitioning the world of proprietary computing platforms to open, industry-standard solutions based on Intel Itanium architecture. Together with leading enterprise software and hardware providers, the Alliance is dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium 2-based solutions. Its membership comprises some of the most influential companies in the computing industry. More information about the Alliance, programs and membership can be found at http://www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org .

About The Gelato Federation

The Gelato Federation is the global technical community dedicated to advancing Linux on the Intel Itanium architecture 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, http://www.gelato.org , 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.

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