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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,' said 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 noted that many Gelato members already work with SGI Altix systems and said, '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.'

Dr Peter Chubb, a researcher at the Gelato@UNSW centre, 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 paid to NUMA issues. In addition to the SGI relationship, UNSW has a longstanding, on-going research relationship with Gelato founding sponsor Hewlett-Packard (HP) to investigate Itanium 2 system scalability. HP has provided UNSW with access to an HP Integrity rx8620 server for these studies.