SAN FRANCISCO — The Itanium Solutions Alliance still won’t say much
about its plans to spend a $10 billion kitty announced in January, but it did identify one project it’s spending a tiny fraction of that money on.
In a collaboration with Gelato, the ISA said it’s giving money to help optimize open source compilers for Linux-based Itanium platforms.
Gelato is a global technical community
focused on advancing Linux on the Intel Itanium platform. It was co-founded
by HP and seven research institutions.
“The Linux community has lacked compiler performance on Itanium, so we’ve
formed a little funding effort to help optimize that area,” Stephen
Howard, an ISA official from HP, told internetnews.com.
“From what
we’ve seen with the fixes they have planned, there could be as much as 50 percent improvement in these open source compilers, and that will really help the universities, research labs and government developers.”
Howard wouldn’t say how much the ISA is spending on this or other
projects. He did say the $10 billion is an amount agreed upon by the core
members of the ISA, which includes Intel, HP, Bull, Fujitsu, Hitachi, SGI and
Unisys, and that all will contribute to the fund.
“The money is really going
to support the Itanium ecosystem in areas like developer support and
marketing,” said Howard. “It’s a significant commitment.”
But Illuminata analyst Gordan Haff sees the $10 billion as more of a
publicity gimmick.
“Sure it represents a fair amount of money being spent on Itanium, but
it’s money those companies would have spent anyway,” Haff told
internetnews.com. “HP is the real key. It has the lion’s share of the
Itanium market, and, not that this is going to happen, but if HP walked away
from the Itanium, Intel would stop development on it the next day.”
Haff said one of the reasons Itanium has been gaining momentum is it fits
well as a replacement or upgrade to several lines of Risc-based systems
based on earlier Alpha, MIPs, and HP’s own PA-Risc. “It’s a very good
processor for that purpose.”
Itanium has weathered criticism from competitors and analysts ever since
it went from being Intel’s future mainstream chip in the 1990s to more of a
high-end play for so-called mission-critical applications. Howard points to
IDC estimates that this part of the market represents a whopping $140
billion hardware opportunity over the next five years.
IDC research also indicates that about half the systems used for these
mission-critical applications are at least three years old.
“There is a
fairly large contingent of folks looking to deploy new systems,” Tony
DeVarco, another representative from ISA, told internetnews.com.
DeVarco, a senior manager at Itanium systems vendor SGI, said that since 9/11
and the Katrina disaster, more companies are looking to high-end systems like
those based on Itanium to manage their data and ensure continuous operation.
Itanium has also seen some recent successes in Japan where systems vendors
Hitachi and NEC are based.
“Japan has been on the vanguard of Itanium
adoption,” said DeVarco. “Power consumption is a big concern there and
Montecito will be a real winner.”
Montecito is Intel’s name for the first dual-core version of Itanium, which
was supposed to come out in late 2005 but has been delayed until this
summer.
HP recently announced its status as the primary technology provider to
ChinaGrid, a massive project run by the education ministry of China that
includes Itanium-based HP ProLiant servers.
ChinaGrid is currently deployed
at some 20 universities in China with plans to add hundreds more. The
goal is to make computing resources available to some 290 million students
and researchers.
Sara Murphy, an HP official responsible for grid computing in its high-performance computing division, said Chinese developers are using open
source software from HP Labs to create one of the world’s largest online
museums. “The content comes from a different museums,” said Murphy.
