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." Formed in 2001, membership includes more than seventy academic and research organizations around the world, including several that operate Itanium-based supercomputers on the Top500 list. The organization is active in projects to enhance the Linux kernel for Itanium and GCC for Itanium. The organization took its name from the Italian dessert Gelato, a rich frozen dessert. The organization pays homage to this by naming sub-projects ( [http://co.gelato.org/vanilla/ Gelato Vanilla] , [http://co.gelato.org/coconut/ Gelato Coconut] ) for varieties of the dessert.

History

In late 2001, representatives from seven organizations met with Hewlett-Packard. The institutions were the [http://www.bii.a-star.edu.sg/newsevents/news.asp?newsid=5 Bioinformatics Institute, Singapore] ; Groupe ESIEE, France; Hewlett-Packard Company; National Center for Supercomputing Applications, USA; Tsinghua University, China; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; [http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au University of New South Wales] , Australia; and [http://gelato.uwaterloo.ca University of Waterloo] , Canada. These were the founding members of Gelato.

Representatives from these organizations met twice a year. The first few meetings (in Palo Alto, California 2001 and Paris 2002) were primarily a "strategy council meeting" where the by-laws and charter were hammered out.

The Sydney meeting in October 2002 was the first that included a day of technical presentations. These became a regular feature of the meetings, now expanded to conferences, and thus the two conferences each year are entirely composed of technical presentations by vendors and members.

Membership

The federation has grown markedly since its inception. As of April 2007, there are more than 70 members and sponsors around the world. Members are institutions, but there are a few individuals who, because of their contribution to IA-64 on Linux or to Gelato, have been made Honorary Members. These include Clemens C. J. Roothaan (who contributed to the Itanium math libraries and floating point unit), Brian Lynn (the original HP representative), David Mosberger-Tang (original porter of Linux to IA-64) and Jean-Pol Taffin (ex-general secretary of ESIEE, and very influential in the early days of Gelato).

Institutional members can be sponsored by an IA-64 vendor, or can come in on their own. Sponsored members typically will have some particular projects in mind.

Conferences

The [http://ice.gelato.org Gelato ICE] : Itanium Conference & Expo alternate between San Jose, California, and somewhere else in the world, often in South-East Asia or Europe. Gelato conferences are where most of the collaboration and cooperation between members is established, and where Intel reveals some of their future strategy for the Itanium-based platform.

Other Activities

Apart from the Members' activities, Gelato funds a Central Operations (hosted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Central Operations, in addition to running the twice-a-year meetings, tries to coordinate and manage a number of projects. These include:
* [http://gcc.gelato.org/ Gelato GCC on Itanium Workgroup] , a group of members and sponsors of the Gelato Federation and the GCC community interested in improving GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) on Itanium processors.
* [http://co.gelato.org/vanilla/ Vanilla] , a concerted effort to port and tune software for Itanium. In addition to the actual tuned binaries, the tuning process is documented.
* [http://co.gelato.org/coconut/ Coconut] , a system of access to Itanium machines for members.
* The Gelato System Grant program, which provides Itanium systems for members.

Sponsors

Gelato gets its money from HP, Intel, the Itanium Solutions Alliance, and SGI.

External links

* [http://www.gelato.org Gelato Federation Web site]
* [http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo Technical Mailing Lists]
* [http://www.gelato.org/community/events/signup.php Event Mailing List]
* [http://ice.gelato.org Gelato ICE] : Itanium Conference & Expo information