ACADEMIA

The Gelato Federation announced today that Silicon Graphics, Inc. has formalized its relationship with the Gelato Federation, the international research consortium dedicated to advancing the Linux OS and Intel Itanium 2 platform, by electing to join as an industry sponsor. As part of their sponsorship, SGI is supporting research at the University of New South Wales and providing technical speakers for the May 2005 Gelato meeting in San Jose, California, May 22-May 25, 2005. Beverly Bernard, SGI's Linux Product Manager responsible for managing kernel software and maintaining relationships with Linux partners such as Red Hat and Novell, is SGI's Gelato liaison. "We are delighted at the prospects for advanced research that we can realize through association with the Gelato Federation," says Bernard, "as well as the fact that we can achieve tremendous insight from the global user community that Gelato represents. Gelato's focus in atmospheric studies and bioinformatics is an ideal complement to our dedication to high-performance computing visualization applications in life sciences, oil exploration, and global climate study." Mark K. Smith, Gelato Federation Director, is enthusiastic about SGI joining forces with Gelato. "SGI is one of the leaders in the Itanium community and we are very excited to have them on board. They have a significant stake in the success of the platform." He noted that many Gelato members already work with SGI Altix systems and are very gratified at SGI's technical involvement: "Participants in our Scalability Focus Group are particularly excited at the prospect of collaborating with SGI because of the deep scalability expertise they bring to the table." SGI to Collaborate with Gelato Founding Member, University of New South Wales SGI will loan an SGI Altix 350 midrange system to the University of New South Wales (UNSW) for enhancing research into non-uniform memory access (NUMA) issues within Linux. The Altix 350 will allow Gelato researchers at UNSW (http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au) to test code on a small scale before investing time on larger machines that SGI and HP make available from time to time to Gelato researchers. Dr. Peter Chubb, researcher at the Gelato@UNSW center, says, "Already discussions with SGI in Melbourne have opened avenues of new research for us. For example, we knew about the general issues associated with NUMA, but according to the people at SGI in Melbourne, they expect that there will be machines with more than a petabyte of real memory available within five years or so! That means that at any given time, there will be several memory chips out of service: how is the operating system going to cope with this?" The UNSW team, in collaboration with other Gelato members around the world, will be concentrating on issues of performance, scalability, and security, with special attention to NUMA issues. In addition to the SGI relationship, UNSW has a longstanding, on-going research relationship with Gelato Founding Sponsor, HP, to investigate Itanium 2 system scalability. HP has provided UNSW with access to an HP Integrity rx8620 server for these studies. To help jump-start new collaborations, UNSW and SGI will take turns hosting speakers on a quarterly basis, to be facilitated through SGI's site in Melbourne, Australia. These technical exchanges will help provide early access to code, so that Gelato researchers can serve as pre-beta testers and help validate changes, not only on the Altix 350 at UNSW, but also on HP Integrity servers running Linux. Also on the horizon will be student exchanges, which will enable Ph.D. candidates to be immersed in a large-machine SGI environment.