When Itanium was launched exactly one year ago, even the most optimistic of Intel executives did not expect it to have a major impact on the market. In fact the company itself was touting the chip's successor, the Itanium 2, as the chip that would kick off Intel's 64bit revolution.

Those who bought the first Itanium systems did so mainly for testing and for porting their 32bit applications onto the new architecture, so the eventual switch to Itanium 2 would be less painful.

One body that deployed Itanium hardware was the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), which runs the world's largest particle physics laboratory just outside Geneva in Switzerland. Cern is building a new particle accelerator and is moving to 64bit systems to increase its ability to analyse data and run simulations.

Professor Manuel Delfino, head of the organisation's IT division, said, "Cern's next-generation accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will have to handle volumes of data in the millions of gigabytes, therefore Cern is interested in 64bit farms running Linux."

Cern is moving its current applications, which are based on 32bit and Risc architectures, over to Itanium systems. The chips will be used in single-processor systems and clusters. The project is expected to be completed by 2005 and will comprise up to 10,000 Itanium nodes in a single cluster, which will then be linked to other clusters around the world by means of grid computing technologies.

The Itanium chips are housed in Fujitsu Siemens Celcius 880 workstations and run 64bit Linux. The same systems also run Load Sharing Facility (LSF) from Platform Computing to make it easier to deal with variable workloads across several different platforms and architectures. So far the results have been impressive, according to Delfino. "One of the exciting things about working with the Itanium processor is that we see performance increases of about three to five times. We're looking for even more performance in the future," he said.

One test by Cern using a benchmark based on Sixtrack, an application for analysing particle acceleration data, showed that a workstation with a single 800MHz Itanium chip was nearly twice as quick as a single-processor Sun Blade 900MHz UltraSparc III system.

Following such promising initial results, Cern is now building a testbed cluster of 16 workstations with dual 800MHz Itanium processors. Cern hopes to complete this testbed project by next year.

The Itanium has impressed Cern so far, but there is still a long way to go before testing and rollout can be considered a success. But continuing improvements in chip technology, such as the Itanium 2, and advances in grid and cluster computing should allow very complex particle physics analysis in the future. "Today, we get in a single node as much power as we got in supercomputers not that long ago," said Delfino. "But even better, we can actually replicate the systems and put hundreds of them to work on the problems all at the same time using these cluster architectures."

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