Older blog entries for nanholda (starting at number 1)

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (April 5, 2005)-- A group of international compiler experts on Intel® Itanium® processors, including representatives from HP, Intel Corporation, the Gelato Federation (http://www.gelato.org), and the GCC community, recently came together to consider Itanium processor-specific improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)--a multi-platform set of compilers for C, C++, Fortran, Objective-C, and the Java[TM] programming language as well as others. The workshop, hosted by the Gelato Federation and the Federation's founding sponsor, HP, was held on January 26-27 in Geneva, Switzerland. The group discussed possible GCC optimizations with a goal of producing faster running code for Itanium 2 processors, ideally in shorter compilation times.

GCC Tweaks Help Itanium Adoption
Improving GCC performance on Itanium is important in the acceleration of the processor's adoption in the broader computing community beyond high-performance computing. The Itanium-based platform is unique because it relies far more on the compiler in comparison to other platforms, and GCC is the standard compiler on GNU/Linux distributions. Many have dismissed Itanium-based platforms as viable determined only on GCC-compiled application performance. Until this point, GCC has not been fined-tuned specifically for Itanium and its high-performance features. Thus, improving GCC performance on Itanium will mean automatically improving thousands of applications and libraries provided by Linux distributions for the Itanium.

On selecting improvements to address, Professor Wen-mei Hwu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains, "We were very judicious in selecting our initial projects. We systematically discussed several potential improvements to GCC and based our proposals on a combination of estimated benefit, effort to implement, and likelihood of GCC community acceptance. In addition, benefits were determined using other compilers that have already implemented the optimizations under consideration."

The group agreed to tackle the three top recommendations: superblock scheduling, rotating register support, and memory disambiguation with additional plans for targeting future modifications. As part of an improved optimization set, superblock scheduling has an estimated gain between 5% and 10%; rotating register support has an estimated gain between 2% and 30%; and memory disambiguation has an estimated gain up to 10%. Beyond the boost in performance for Itanium, these modifications are also expected to benefit other platforms.

According to Al Stone, senior software engineer at HP and co-organizer of the workshop, "This meeting was a great success to move the goals of the organization forward. The face-to-face discussions enabled attendees to quickly pinpoint and prioritize optimizations to implement, to build collaborative relationships, and to develop a strategic plan of action."

More details about the workshop can be found at: http://www.gelato.org/community/workshop/gcc/index.php.

Coordination Key
Since accepting improvements into the GCC development cycle is under the control of the GCC community, working with the GCC developers and keeping them informed of work progress is key to the acceptance of these proposed improvements. Attending the workshop was Gerald Pfeifer, a GCC developer and project manager at Novell, who gave keen insight on building a strong relationship with the GCC community. "You must keep an open line of communication and collaboration between project developers and the GCC community." Pfeifer says. "GCC is used by millions of people who have great expectations in terms of the stability and performance of these compilers. GCC developers cannot simply accept a series of patches if they are not confident with them."

Measures are in place to promote coordination between the Linux Itanium project developers and the GCC representatives to insure initial efforts will be implemented and to pave the way for future work. Close contact is maintained through an active mailing list, bi-weekly conference calls, and a workgroup wiki. In addition, several workshop attendees--HP; Intel; and Gelato members, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences--have submitted papers about specific improvement efforts to the GCC Summit June 22-24 in Ottawa, Canada. Development contributions are planned to be made according to the GCC 4.1 release cycle schedule, and results will be shared at the Gelato Federation Meeting May 23-25 in San Jose, California (http://www.gelato.org/community/events/sanjose).

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.

If you'd like more information on this topic, please contact Nan Holda via email at nan@gelato.org or by phone at 217-265-0947.

Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Java, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (March 18, 2005)--The Gelato Federation announced today that Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI) 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.

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.

Hosted by Founding Sponsor HP, the May Meeting of the Gelato Federation, "Understanding Your Itanium System to Maximize Performance," will be held May 22-May 25, 2005 in San Jose, CA. More than 100 scientists and engineers from three dozen Gelato Sponsor and Member institutions are expected to attend this 2-1/2 day highly-technical event hosted by HP. This meeting, spanning the evening of May 22 to the afternoon of May 25, will focus on Itanium system architecture and platform performance. There will be a number of architecture presentations from HP, Intel, and SGI, as well as updates from Gelato members on their platform-specific work (http://www.gelato.org/community/events/sanjose/).

Silicon Graphics, SGI and Altix are registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

If you'd like more information on this topic, please contact Nan Holda via email at nan@gelato.org or by phone at 217-265-0947.