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Gelato Joins FSG, Ports Eclipse 3.0 To Linux-Itanium

The Gelato Federation has been busy this summer. As the newest member of the Free Standards Group, Gelato joins a distinguished body of corporations and non-profits, all adherents of the open-source ideal, all dedicated to strengthening the community with a common set of standards. In fact, Gelato is among friends at FSG, including Gelato's Founding Sponsor, HP, and Gelato's much-anticipated newest sponsor, Intel.

According to Gelato director Mark K. Smith: "Gelato's mission to facilitate the development of open-source software infrastructure for Linux on the Itanium 2 platform is very consistent with FSG's goals to ensure that Linux applications and platforms work together seamlessly. We're delighted to join the community that's coming together around FSG. As a research and user community dedicated to advancing the Linux-Itanium platform, Gelato recognizes the value and, in fact, the necessity of ensuring interoperability in our open-source development efforts. FSG is doing an incredibly important job for the open-source community, and we're proud to be part of that effort. We look forward to extensive interaction with FSG as our members explore additional applications and infrastructure for Linux-Itanium users."

Smith not only lauded the FSG, but indicates that Gelato intends to be a proactive member: "All Gelato Members are encouraged to make their Linux-Itanium software compliant with the Linux Standards Base (LSB), the prevailing Linux standard."

And that could prove to be a big force in the open-source community, since Gelato now boasts 30-plus institutional members who occupy literally dozens of spots on the Top500. The newest one, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, houses the world's largest Itanium cluster, "Thunder," which comprises 1024 quad Itanium processor systems.

"The Gelato Federation's work to advance the Linux Itanium platform is important for the industry," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Free Standards Group. "We are thrilled they've become a member of the FSG and will join forces with us to promote Linux standards."

Gelato Makes Itanium-Friendly Eclipse Available

As its first formal collaboration with FSG, Gelato engineers have successfully ported Eclipse 3.0 to the Linux-Itanium platform. The popular open-source integrated development environment, including the Eclipse source, binary, and all of its newly rebuilt dependencies, is now available on the Gelato portal, www.gelato.org, and is ready to run on any LSB-compliant IA64 system with a properly installed Java Virtual Machine. The Itanium-based Eclipse was demonstrated on an HP Itanium system at Gelato's booth at LinuxWorld. Gelato Engineer Kevin Cernekee of the University of Illinois contributed to the new Itanium-friendly Eclipse 3.0. He noted that the package posted at www.gelato.org includes "all the enhancements of Eclipse 3.0 as released by the Eclipse Foundation (6-21-04: www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/jun212004r30pr.html), with the code cleaned and modified for Linux-Itanium users."

In addition to the Eclipse 3.0 package, the Gelato portal also offers the 3.0 source build and Itanium build, as well as a new version of the script that builds C dependencies (e.g., the platform launcher and the libswt/C side), which can be tweaked for research uses.

Smith is enthusiastic about the new offering: "Eclipse 3.0 is an important addition to the Linux-Itanium tool set. The IDE enhances the user experience and provides a suitable interface environment for other tools and applications. This bodes well for the advancement of Linux-Itanium overall and underscores Gelato's long-term mission."

The Eclipse revisions for Itanium started with a Red Hat patch that made Eclipse portable to AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. Cernekee polished that code and collaborated with Red Hat engineers for the Itanium porting. These efforts came to the attention of the Eclipse Foundation, which anticipates incorporating the Itanium code into an upcoming Eclipse release.