Palo Alto, CA — (press release excerpt) — Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) today announced formation of the GELATO Federation, a worldwide consortium focused on enabling open source computing solutions for academic, government and industrial research based on the combination of the Linux operating system running on Intel's Itanium processors. The GELATO Federation, also known as GELATO, will work to develop scalable, commodity software to enable researchers to advance their studies in developing and technology-intensive areas, such as life sciences and physical sciences. GELATO invites participation from all interested organizations.

Co-founded by HP and seven of the world's leading research institutions, the GELATO Federation is launching an open source community initiative designed to foster the development and dissemination of focused computing solutions for researchers and associated IT staffs working on the Itanium Linux platform. GELATO will provide the research community with software downloads, including new solutions developed by GELATO member institutions and by other contributors from the greater open source community. GELATO also will supply information services — such as forums and technical data — to make the Itanium Linux platform more accessible to researchers and their support staffs.

Membership in GELATO is open to all academic, government and corporate entities. New members are eligible to have representatives on GELATO's governing strategy council. GELATO also plans to actively seek collaboration with other open source organizations and individual contributors. Founding members include the BioInformatics Institute (Singapore), Groupe ESIEE (France), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Tsinghua University (China), University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign (UIUC), University of New South Wales (Australia) and the University of Waterloo (Canada). Each institution will provide financial backing, IT infrastructure, and human resources to oversee and support GELATO's mission and operations. Representatives of these organizations bring expertise in biotechnology, grid computing, compilers and languages, Linux kernel performance, security, among other capabilities.

GELATO will focus on open-source technologies across all levels, including compilers and programming tools, Linux kernel performance, middleware services, security, software support for interconnects, and application-specific tools. Technical solutions will be optimized for the Itanium 64 bit architecture and for performance scalability, from single node processors to Linux clusters to grid computing. The GELATO Federation endorses the major tenets of the open source movement, including a primary emphasis on the user; a commitment to developing high quality, 100% open source software; and a dedication to a non-bureaucratic, egalitarian, and collaborative working environment.

 
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