The Gelato Federation, a global research community behind Itanium Linux, held a two-and-a-half day meeting about Itanium 2 attended by 90 representatives of 30 companies. Meeting highlights included talks on the world's fifth largest supercomputer, bioinformatics research, grid computing, and more.

“Itanium” is a 64-bit processor from Intel.

In all, twenty-eight scientific presentations were delivered, while meetings were held among Gelato's technology focus groups, which include Clusters and Grids, Parallel File Systems, and Box Scalability.

Program highlights included:

• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discussed the deployment of a 54TB Lustre filesystem on their HP Integrity rx2600 Itanium 2 cluster with a Quadrics interconnect, which is ranked fifth on the TOP500 supercomputers list.
• 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 and the Virtual Machine Interface, a high-performance communication middleware, with the MPICH implementation layered on top.
• The University of New South Wales (Australia) presented user-mode gigabit Ethernet drivers and the user mode IDE drivers, as well as progress reports on a new page table format and superpage support.

Presentations and additional details of the meet are available online at Gelato.org.

 
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