Gelato to Promote Linux Itanium at Brazil Meeting

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill., USA (September 13, 2005)-The Gelato Federation
(http://www.gelato.org) 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.
Details at http://www.gelato.org/meeting.

"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 (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.

For more information, please contact:
Nan Holda
nan@gelato.org
217.265.0947

Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its
subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux® is the
registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. All
other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective
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