Hello,
Currently CERN is doing all of the work for the Itanium (ia64) support 
in Scientific Linux.  This is because they have Itanium machines.

CERN's hardware roadmap has them phasing out the few Itanium's that they 
use, and eventually getting rid of all of them.  When this happens CERN 
will no longer support the ia64 port of Scientific Linux.  We would like 
to phase out the itanium support at that time.

This is not going to happen overnight, or in a few months, but it will 
happen.  When it does, we do not want it to be a surprise to the 
Scientific Linux community.

We have asked the High Energy Physic's community at the last two HEPIX 
conferences, if anyone will be affected, and both time's, nobody said 
that they would.
We have also asked on scientific-linux-devel mailing list if there was 
anyone there that would be greatly affected.  Although there was some 
concern, nobody had any objections.

I am now bringing this to the main body of the Scientific Linux 
community.  Is there a lab, university, or organization that not only 
needs Scientific Linux on ia64, but is also willing to support it?

The main developers have all agreed that it's ok by us if ia64 goes away 
gracefully.  We don't want ia64 hanging around if nobody is using it. 
But on the other hand, if someone needs it, and is willing to put forth 
the effort to support it, we will be willing to keep it in the 
distribution.

For those that are wondering how many Itanium machines are using 
Scientific Linux, we have a statistics page that shows.  This page is 
just numbers from the main ftp server, as such, it should only be used 
for percentages.
https://www.scientificlinux.org/about/stats/arch.html

As you see, only 28 Itanium machines are reported, out of 16,337 
machines.  If I further trim out fermilab, cern, and obvious mirrors, 
that number drops down to 18.

That's alot of work for 18 machines.

But, for all I know, one of those mirror's is actually for a site that 
has several thousand Itanium machines.  And if that is the case, I want 
to make sure that we don't just drop them, which is why I am sending 
this e-mail out.

Thanks
Troy Dawson
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/CSS  CSI Group
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