The Itanium Solutions Blog

Last spring, many of you know that some of the world’s top processor compiler engineers gathered together this spring in Toronto to share their latest research findings in the area of compiler technology and discuss how to realize the full potential of the EPIC architecture. Great content, presentations, and ideas that came out of the worskshop, highlighted below.

David R. Ditzel, Vice President and Chief Architect for Hybrid Parallel Computing for the Intel Architecture Group at Intel Corporation gave the keynote address titled “Dynamic Translation on EPIC Architectures.” During the keynote, Dr. Ditzel explained his thesis that The future of computing belongs to EPIC Architectures saying that EPIC is a more power efficient approach to computing, that dynamic translation will improve power advantages, and that there may be a different EPIC in the future than we know today. Click here for Dr. Ditzel’s slide presentation. Dr. Ditzel further detailed why we need the EPIC architecture and emphasized its advantages:

Lambert Schaelicke, Component Design Engineer, Intel Corporation, gave a presentation named “Intel® Itanium® Quad-Core Architecture for the Enterprise,” providing an overview of the Intel Itanium 9300 series processor and highlighting the significant advances over previous-generation processors; including doubling the number of processing cores, the numerous microarchitectural enhancements in the cores, integration of a scalable directory-based system interconnect, and two memory controllers on the same die. Click here for the presentation abstract and the slide presentation.

Andrey Bokhanko, IPF Compiler Architect of Intel, and Workshop Chairman writes:

Click here to view the final program with all presentations available for download.

Jewelry manufacturer Stuller is offering up some good economic news from the gulf region. The Lafayette, La.-based company is experiencing significant growth with more than 4,000 orders per day from over 30,000 customers. Stuller was running its Oracle databases and ERP software on a 10-year-old HP Superdome server. But transaction peaks during holidays were straining the system. Stuller also wanted to upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, which wasn’t possible on its existing Superdome.

While considering the various platform options, concerns about performance and uptime were paramount. The company ended up choosing HP and Itanium over IBM Power thanks in part to its existing relationship with HP. Stuller’s Chief Technology Officer, Carol Skarlat, said:

Read more in an article from SearchOracle.com.

It’s that time of the year where HP takes over Las Vegas with their annual mega-event — the HP Tech Forum. For HP customers with Itanium-based systems, there is a wide variety of hands-on labs, ambassador meetings, and breakout sessions to choose from. This includes 32 sessions on Integrity servers, 23 on NonStop, 20 on OpenVMS, and 19 on HP-UX. View the session catalog here.

There is also a Mission Critical SuperSession hosted by Martin Fink, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems, and Kirk Bresniker, Chief Technologist, HP Fellow, Business Critical Systems. They’ll unveil a new Integrity portfolio live and in person and discuss how the new Integrity Systems are optimized for mission critical infrastructures.

If you can’t make it to the HP Tech Forum, it’s not too late to sign up for a live broadcast of HP’s Dave Donatelli Keynote from Las Vegas on June 22nd.

On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I would like to congratulate our 2010 Innovation Award Humanitarian Impact winner and category finalists who are being announced this week. Our Humanitarian winner is COMPUTAEX from the the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain. COMPUTAEX relies on an Itanium-based supercomputer to support a wide variety of complex social, environmental, and scientific improvement projects for the region. Their entry was truly outstanding and we applaud their significant list of achievements and positive impact since completing their launch in March 2009.

I would also like to recognize the impressive list of finalists in our other categories as selected by our esteemed panel of judges. They are as follows:

Computationally Intensive Applications:

- COMPUTAEX
- eBay
- University of Malaga

Data Center Modernization:

- Fraport AG
- Future Electronics
- MegaFon

Mission-Critical Data:

- Nordea Bank Finland
- Taiwan’s Bureau of Labor Insurance
- The Shanghai Stock Exchange
- Yodobashi Camera

Winners of these other categories will be announced on September 14th, 2010 at the Innovation Awards Celebration in San Francisco at The Westin St. Francis. This was a banner year for the Innovation Awards program, with submissions received from across the globe from companies, universities and not for profit organizations — all of whom are realizing truly impressive results from their Itanium-based servers. Thank you to all of our entrants and to our judges!

This week, XbitLabs.com ran an informative piece called “Intel: The World Needs Itanium, So Do We.” Fresh off an interview with Intel Spokesman Pat Ward, Anton Shilov delivered an interesting perspective about Itanium, Xeon, and the launch of the new Knights Corner chip. He attributes the following quote to Pat:

Read the entire article here.