Over 100 scientists, developers, and engineers from more than 30 companies and institutions convened from all around the globe for the October 2006 Gelato ICE: Itanium® Conference & Expo held in Singapore. The event was organized by the Gelato Federation (http://www.gelato.org), an international user community dedicated to advancing Linux® on the Intel® Itanium® architecture. The conference was hosted by the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), and National Grid Office (NGO). Conference sponsors included HP, Intel, and the Itanium® Solutions Alliance, and media sponsors included HPCwire and GRIDtoday.
"NGO was very proud to partner the A*STAR research institutes in hosting Gelato ICE and to help provide a conducive environment for attendees to learn more about Linux on Itanium-based platforms," stated Hing-Yan Lee, deputy director of NGO. "As a user of this platform ourselves, we recognize the great asset that the Linux on Itanium architecture provides for high-end grid computing and high-performance computing in general."
Presentations and Cutting-Edge Projects Showcased
A major goal of the Gelato Federation is education, an area in which the October 2006 Gelato ICE excelled. Focused on areas such as virtualization, multi-core programming, grid, scalability, research, and techniques for software developers, the event delivered an exceptional speaker line-up and technical program with nearly 40 presentations. Highlights were the keynote speeches given by Steve Geary (HP), Cameron McNairy (Intel), and Jeff Adie (SGI and the Itanium Solutions Alliance), and a ceremony for the inaugural Gelato Innovative Projects for Itanium Processors (IP)2 Award, given to Peter Chubb of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) for his team's work on large memory pages (superpages)
A new program track on multi-core programming was voted a favorite by attendees as was a track targeting software developers sponsored by the Itanium Solutions Alliance. Notable in this track were: "An Update on the Perfmon2 Interface" by Stéphane Eranian (HP); "64-Bit Migration to Linux on Itanium: Challenges, Advantages, and Tools" by Soumitra Chatterjee (HP); and "Hyper-Threading on Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processors" by Cameron McNairy (Intel).
Presentations from the conference can be found at http://ice.gelato.org/
In addition to presenting, Gelato members—some of the world's top supercomputing centers, national labs, research centers, and universities—
Posters from the conference can be found at http://www.gelato.org/
"It was amazing to see the enthusiastic exchange and collaborative spirit among end users, developers, researchers, ISVs, and system vendors during this conference,"
Upcoming Events for Gelato Federation
Gelato will exhibit at booth #848 at the upcoming Supercomputing Conference (SC06) on November 13-16 in Tampa, Florida and will feature a demonstration highlighting Xen on the Itanium processor as well as examples of the Gelato ICE multi-core programming training.
With the tremendous amount of high-quality technical information delivered and critical mass of Linux and Itanium processor experts attending, the October 2006 Gelato ICE was a major success. The next Gelato ICE is planned for April 15-18, 2007, in San Jose, California. The following Gelato ICE is set for September 30-October 3 in Singapore. Stay tuned to http://www.ice.gelato.org/
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 (http://www.gelato.org)
