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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Platforms:
Gelato Highlights New Linux-Itanium Advances
More than 90 representatives of 30 Gelato Federation Member institutions and
corporations met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from May 24
to May 26 to review and exchange research advances for Linux on the Intel
Itanium 2 platform. The meeting, hosted by Gelato founding members the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (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 United States since Gelato was
launched in early 2002.
Gelato is the global research community dedicated to advancing the Linux
Itanium platform through collaborative relationships targeting real-world
problems and solutions.
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 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 its HP Integrity rx2600 Itanium
2 cluster with a Quadrics interconnect, which is ranked No. 9 on the TOP500
list of 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.
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.
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