UpFRONT

Don't forget the Annual Perl Community Gathering—The O'Reilly Perl Conference 5 held July 23-27, 2001 in San Diego, California. As their web site says: “The O'Reilly Perl Conference has been a mainstay of Perl culture since 1997, gathering the leaders and young guns of Perl in an unequaled meeting of minds. TPC, as it is known, is a place where all Perl programmers can learn and share in the fun and diversity that is Perl.” See http://conferences.oreilly.com/perl/ for more details.

Microprocessors and operating systems are companion technologies, but storytellers (folks like us) usually treat the characters separately—even given major exceptions like Wintel and PowerPC. Now, as we look toward next-generation 64-bit chips from Intel and AMD, the stories tend to be about what those companies are doing vs. each other, rather than with the communities of developers surrounding the operating systems that put CPUs to work.

As we go to press, Intel's Itanium (aka IA-64) is rolling into production, almost exactly seven years after Intel and Hewlett-Packard announced the partnership that would work on the new chip design, which reportedly began its life in HP's labs as “PA-RISC Wide-Word”. The new joint design was code-named Merced and later given its elementine brand name. Sun Microsystems came to market with its UltraSPARC III 64-bit processor last fall, but that's bound to be less interesting to the Linux community than both Itanium and AMD's Sledgehammer, currently slated for release about a year from now.

But Itanium is here. As Linley Gwennap says, “Changes in servers never happen fast. But with Itanium now a reality, Intel's dominance is only a matter of time.”

And what operating system will most help achieve this dominance? The top press release linked from Intel's Itanium index page is titled “Intel Itanium-Based Systems Poised For Production”, and says this about operating systems:

Note the future tense employed by the operative verb phrase here: will support.

On May 29, SuSE announced SuSE Linux 7.2 for IA-64 and Red Hat announced Red Hat Linux 7.1 for the Itanium Processor. The next day Turbolinux announced Turbolinux Operating System 7 for the Itanium. All three expressed availability in the present tense. At this writing, three of the four headlines among Intel's Itanium “news and events” involve Linux. The fourth is “Microsoft Unveils Plans for 64-Bit Windows Platform”.

As for hardware, SGI announced (also on May 29) Silicon Graphics 750 system for Linux, which it called “The First Itanium Processor-Based System Using Linux”. IBM also said it was building the second of the world's fastest Linux supercomputers at NCSA by clustering Itanium-based boxes with Turbolinux. It's due to be installed this summer.

Credit should be spread in many directions, but perhaps that can be done at once by pointing to the Trillian Project (now called LinuxIA64.org at http://linuxia64.org/), which began in May 1999 and brought together Caldera, CERN, Cygnus (now Red Hat), HP, Intel, Linuxcare, NEC, SGI, Turbolinux and VA Linux. Most of those organizations now have something to show for the effort.

So, it's already hard to imagine that Itanium's success won't be due largely to its adoption as a penguin element.

—Doc Searls