Taking Itanium to the world ECE professor's work is key

In 1991, Finnish student Linus Torvalds unexpectedly sowed the seeds of a computer revolution with Linux, his own version of the Unix operating system. He planted the Linux kernel on the Internet, basically giving it away for free and creating a worldwide, open collaboration among programmers.

Today, the University of Illinois is planting the seeds of another worldwide collaboration--this time on the new Itanium Linux platform--through an international organization known as Gelato.

The Coordinated Science Lab (CSL) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications serve as the worldwide hub for the Gelato Federation, which was founded by Hewlett-Packard in early 2002 with seven of the world’s leading research institutions, including Illinois. Membership has since grown to 20 members, sponsors and active contributors from Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia. (See http://www.gelato.org/about/federation/members.php for a complete list.)

Gelato’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of Linux on Itanium by providing tools, math libraries and applications that are already recompiled and optimized for the new platform. Much of that infrastructure, including Gelato’s OpenIMPACT compiler and the new GOLD software (Gelato’s OSCAR-Linux clustering solution), is available on the Gelato Portal (www.Gelato.org).

All Gelato software is downloadable, providing organizations with the resources to get up and running with Itanium Linux, said Mark K. Smith, managing director of the Gelato Federation at CSL. The portal also includes research information in high-performance computing, database systems and software engineering. It’s a dynamic forum, Smith said, open and accessible to all.

Itanium Linux is still in the early stages, just gaining traction, but its advantages are fast becoming known. The new Itanium 2 chip can crunch data in 64-bit mouthfuls during every tick of the system’s internal clock—getting work done significantly faster than current 32-bit systems. Fortune magazine writes that Itanium’s power boost is “the computer equivalent of adding 30 or 40 IQ points.”

“If you’re doing work that is memory intensive, or if it’s floating-point intensive, the Itanium does tremendously well,” Smith noted.

That’s why the early adopters of Itanium Linux are organizations running large data-mining applications, typically at industry, government and university supercomputing centers and research laboratories that digest massive amounts of data, such as earthquake, atmospheric and high-energy physics information.

Itanium, which has been dubbed a “killer chip” because of its unprecedented power, was developed by Hewlett-Packard and Intel in collaboration with research institutions such as the University of Illinois. In fact, ECE Professor Wen-Mei Hwu, a principal investigator in the Gelato Federation, did vital work on the OpenIMPACT compiler. And as Smith points out, the compiler is the key to Itanium.

”Other 64-bit chips can do parallel processing, as Itanium does. But they do their optimizing on-the-fly," he said. "This adds undue complexity and overhead to the chip and kills processor performance."

With Itanium, on the other hand, the compiler does the parallelism ahead of time. “The compiler actually goes through the code and optimizes it before it is even sent to the chip,” Smith explained.

As a result, the Itanium chip has less overhead and is able to execute more instructions per clock cycle.

“Itanium is essentially next-generation, high-performance computing," he said. “It’s to be expected that adoption of Itanium will require a massive new infrastructure. Early adopters must have the Itanium-optimized tools, utilities and applications they need to work on the new platform. This is what Gelato is all about.”

As Gelato receives applications for new members nearly every week, Smith said the federation is just reaching a critical mass. He compares it to a snowball on the top of a hill.

“We have to keep pushing it, but soon it’s going to start rolling by itself,” he said. “We’re almost at that point.”