From Beijing to Pittsburgh: Gelato Champions Itanium.CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Representatives from more than 25 Gelato Federation The Gelato Federation (usually just Gelato) is a "global technical community dedicated to advancing Linux® on the Intel® Itanium® platform through collaboration, education, and leadership. member institutions and corporations met on October 11-13, 2004, at Tsinghua University History Tsinghua University was established in Beijing in 1911 on the site of a former royal garden belonging to a prince, and was funded by an indemnity which in Beijing, China to review and exchange research advances for Linux on the Intel(R) Itanium(R)2 platform. Twenty-one technical presentations by top research and industry users focused on high-performance computing High-speed computing, which typically refers to supercomputers used in scientific research. issues and collaborative solutions. Three weeks later, over 20 Gelato ge·la·to n. pl. ge·la·ti An Italian ice cream or ice. [Italian, from past participle of gelare, to freeze; see gelatin.] member institutions are gathering at SC2004 in Pittsburgh (November 8-11). Intel and HP Initiate System Grant Program At the Beijing meetings, Mark K. Smith, Gelato's Managing Director, announced a program of system grants for Gelato members, made possible by Gelato sponsors Intel and HP. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Smith, "In this joint effort, Intel is providing Itanium processors for HP systems. A significant number of systems will be awarded to Gelato members through a competitive proposal process intended to seed platform research and develop new software infrastructure. This is a tremendous opportunity to catalyze some exciting new work and encourage some productive new collaborations among members. We are delighted to work so closely with Intel and HP on this project." On hand for the Beijing announcement of the Intel-HP program were Bob Kuhn, Director for Intel's Parallel and Distributed Solutions Division; and Michel Benard, Program Manager for HP's University Relations. Both serve as representatives to the Gelato Federation. Kuhn explained that "Intel is very pleased to donate processors to the Gelato system grant program. This is a wonderful way to foster the advancement of the platform as our collaborations with Federation members advance the state of Itanium programming tools." HP's Benard added, "This program is designed to foster the development of open-source tools and applications for Itanium. By joining with Intel on this initiative, we at HP anticipate broad and productive collaborations with Gelato Federation members, which will result in solid advances in Linux-Itanium computing." Beijing Meeting Technical Highlights Major discussion in Beijing addressed the commoditization Commoditization 1. A situation when illiquid financial contracts are changed or modified in a way that promotes trading and results in a more liquid market. 2. Making a product into a commodity. Notes: 1. of Itanium and critically needed modifications to the gcc compiler. Regarding the Itanium processor, Gelato members were optimistic about Intel's new multi-core technology, promised in 2005, and confident that x86 64-bit extensions will drive the move to the Itanium platform. Shin Yee Chung of Singapore's Institute for High-Performance Computing noted that with the growing disparity between processor and memory speed, use of cache to hide memory latency In computing, memory latency is the time between initiating a request for a byte or word in memory until it is retrieved. If the data is not in the processor's cache, it takes longer to obtain them, as the processor will have to communicate with the external memory cells. is critical to HPC (Handheld PC) A palmtop computer that weighs less than one pound and runs specialized versions of popular applications. Microsoft coined the term for its Windows CE operating system, which is an abbreviated version of Windows. See Pocket PC. . While cache can improve general performance, fine tuning Fine Tuning is the name of XM Satellite Radio's eclectic music channel. The program director for Fine Tuning is Ben Smith. The channel is described as "A musical oasis for the sophisticated listener culled from every imaginable genre and country. to a specific cache configuration can greatly improve performance. Unfortunately, fine-tuning by hand is very expensive. Cache-oblivious algorithms can fine-tune performance at runtime and improve cache performance dynamically, but they can also adversely affect overall performance due to function call overhead. Chung described research to minimize this overhead through cache-oblivious adaptive algorithms. Because the Itanium compiler is critical to performance, this is a major focus of Gelato research. An ORC-based OpenMP compiler was presented by the research team of Prof. Weimin Zheng of Tsinghua University. The team is identifying optimization opportunities to explore thread-level parallelism using OpenMP. The OpenMP binary was tuned for the IA64 architecture by integrating the OpenMP processing module with other ORC optimizations using performance data provided by pfmon and perflib. Results are promising, with up to 25% speedup per overhead cost. Bob Kidd of the University of Illinois University of Illinois may refer to:
From CERN's openlab, Andreas Hirstius updated the Federation on development of the high-speed wide-area networking that will be required when CERN's Large Hadron Collider This article or section contains information about an expected future scientific facility. It is likely to contain information of a speculative nature and the content may change as the facility approaches completion. goes online in 2007. Anticipated data rates per experiment range from 200-1200MB/s, but because of large volumes, the data must be distributed to locations worldwide for analysis. The challenge is to set up reliable transoceanic 10Gb connections with these global partners. Hirstius focused his talk on how CERN CERN or European Organization for Nuclear Research, nuclear and particle physics research center straddling the French-Swiss border W of Geneva, Switzerland. is measuring stability, responsiveness, and recovery of the 10Gb network, as well as hardware and storage systems. Their Itanium cluster has demonstrated excellent stability and I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output capabilities for these networking tests. Additional technical highlights from the Gelato meetings can be found on the Gelato portal at http://www.gelato.org/community/gelato_meeting.php?id=BJ2004T. Gelato Federation at SC2004 Gelato will also make sure that Linux-Itanium is front and center at SC2004 in Pittsburgh. The Gelato agenda includes a "Birds of a Feather Birds Of a Feather - (BOF) (From the saying "Birds of a feather flock together") An informal discussion group, scheduled on a conference program or formed ad hoc, to consider a specific issue or subject. " session on Wednesday, November 10, at which Gelato members and those interested can get an update on technical highlights from the recent Federation meetings in Beijing, meet Gelato industry sponsors, preview the just-released OpenIMPACT Itanium compiler, and get the latest from Intel on their current and upcoming compiler releases. At the Gelato SC2004 booth (#746), representatives from the University of Illinois will demo the new OpenIMPACT compiler on an HP Itanium system. OpenIMPACT produces highly optimized binaries (on par with Intel's icc compiler) through aggressive use of predication In CPU instruction execution, executing all outcomes of a branch in parallel. When the correct branch is finally known, the results of the incorrect branch sequences are discarded. See branch prediction. , speculation, instruction-level parallelism, and profile-based optimizations. For ease of use, a gcc-like interface was added to the extensive research framework of the original IMPACT compiler, which was developed for research purposes. OpenIMPACT can be used as a high-performance alternative to traditional compilers. Source and documentation for OpenIMPACT are at http://www.gelato.uiuc.edu. About Gelato The Gelato Federation is the global research community dedicated to advancing the Linux Itanium platform through collaborative relationships targeting real-world problems and solutions. Gelato members are suppliers and users of Linux Itanium technology with a shared goal of producing open-source solutions for academic, government, and industrial HPC research. The Gelato portal (http://www.gelato.org) 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. |
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