LinuxQuestions.org - Gelato to Promote Linux Itanium at Brazil Meeting, Oct. 2-5, 2005

The Gelato Federation has set its sights on Latin America and beyond for its October 2-5 meeting in Brazil to advance Linux® on the Intel® Itanium® platform. This semiannual event, which has evolved into the world's largest gathering of Linux-Itanium users, will be hosted by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) and sponsored by HP and Intel.

The October Gelato meeting, titled "The Itanium ERA: Education, Research, Application," will give attendees a chance to learn more about Linux on Itanium, share knowledge and experiences, form collaborative relationships, and discuss ways to expand the platform. Additionally, there will be special sessions to discuss work on Itanium processor-specific improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). All interested parties are welcome to attend.

"Once again, we have a top-notch technical program with 25 presentations by leading Itanium developers, researchers, and end users," said Gelato Managing Director Mark K. Smith. "The meeting is not only focusing on the work of regional members but is also presenting vital technical information to help users gain maximum performance from their Itanium systems."

Gelato is comprised of 49 of the world's foremost supercomputing centers, national labs, research centers, and universities from almost every continent on the globe and industry sponsors HP, Intel, and SGI. Gelato meeting locations are as geographically-diverse as its members. Past sites have included Australia, France, Sweden, China and the USA; however, this will be the first Gelato meeting held in Latin America.

"Gelato's Latin American members are recognized as leading research institutions in the region, "stated Lueny Morell, Director for University Relations in Latin America at HP. "We're delighted to have this meeting in Brazil and share some of our cutting-edge research on the Itanium-based HP Integrity platforms running Linux."

Contributions from Latin American Members

Participation in the Gelato Federation from Latin American institutions now includes six key universities: PUCRS and the Universidade Federal da Campina Grande (UFCG), both from Brazil; the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM); the Universidad de Chile; the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina; and the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Mexico. Two new applicants from Brazil, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, have pending membership in the Federation. Linux-Itanium work from all these institutions covers a wide-range of progressive projects, from research on cluster and grid computing to scientific and industrial applications.

Gelato-related work at PUCRS, October's meeting host, is headed by Dr. César De Rose, Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and leader of the Research Center in High Performance Computing (CPAD). PUCRS Linux-Itanium research currently focuses on investigating system monitoring and performance analysis for heterogeneous clusters including Itanium machines. The PUCRS team intends to define new performance metrics and heuristics for heterogeneous clusters, including regular system metrics (e.g. CPU, memory, and network utilization) and hardware specific metrics obtained through hardware counters.

Dr. Walfredo Cirne, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory at UFCG, heads that institution's Gelato-related efforts. Their present work centers around one of the largest research projects in computational grids in Brazil, OurGrid. An open-source (GPL) project, OurGrid strives to provide a complete grid solution for bag-of-tasks applications (parallel applications whose tasks are independent of each other), including the search for good out-of-the-box performance for grid middleware running on Itanium.

UPRM's Gelato-related activities are led by the PDC Group (Parallel and Distributed Computing Laboratory), which is headed by Dr. Wilson Rivera. The PDC Group performs research in the design, implementation, and efficiency measurements of parallel algorithms as well as research issues related to parallel and distributed computing systems with an emphasis on high-performance cluster and grid computing. Their current Gelato activities include implementing a high-performance set of hyperspectral imaging analysis algorithms for the Itanium processor.

Dr. Hugo Daniel Scolnik, Professor in the Computer Sciences Department, leads the Gelato efforts at UBA, which involve examining how certain features of the Itanium processor can be exploited for scientific applications. In addition to completing a comparison of 64- and 32-bit architectures in relation to their performance for scientific programming, UBA has begun development of new algorithms for reconstruction of tomographic images.

Gelato-related efforts at the Universidad de Chile are housed at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) under the direction of Dr. Alejandro Jofré, Vice Director of the CMM and Professor in the Department of Mathematical Engineering. CMM is also part of PRAGMA, the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly, and is an associated unit of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). The university's Linux-Itanium work aims to develop high-performance computing to solve complex modeling problems in industrial sectors such as bio-mining, energy, telecommunications, environmental studies, genomics, and transportation.

Coordinating Gelato work at ITESM is Dr. David Garza-Salazar, Professor and Director of Research and Graduate Programs in the Division of Electronics and Information Technologies. ITESM is developing Linux-Itanium applications, tools, and techniques. In the application area, the focus is on verification based on biometrics, speech and speaker recognition, optimization with evolutionary algorithms, and digital libraries. For tools and techniques, the focus is on resource sharing with collaborative and distributed decision making, and computer network paravirtualization.

About Gelato

The Gelato Federation is the international user community dedicated to advancing the Linux-Itanium platform. Gelato members are suppliers and users of Linux-Itanium technology with a shared goal of producing solutions for academia, government, and industry. The Gelato portal serves as the primary channel for Federation business and collaborations. Information about Gelato members' software and solutions are available through the portal, and the community is welcome to participate and contribute.

For more information, please contact:
Nan Holda
nan at gelato dot org
217.265.0947