GOVERNMENT

PALO ALTO, CA -- Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HWP) and Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT) today announced that Red Hat Linux software will be donated to selected universities as part of HP and Intel(R) Corporation's Itanium(TM)-based Systems Grants program. Red Hat Linux 7.1 operating system will be provided to the 40 universities that received grants from the program. Red Hat also will provide those universities with a one-year subscription to Red Hat Network, an open source information and software service. "HP is pleased to work with Red Hat to provide grant recipients with key enabling technology for Linux research, which will also extend the deployment of open systems," said Martin Fink, general manager, HP Linux Systems Operation. "This research should significantly advance Linux on the Itanium architecture -- unlocking the potential of this technology and ultimately benefiting HP customers." Announced in September, the HP and Intel Itanium-based Systems Grant Program is a $2.5 million joint effort between HP and Intel in which HP servers and workstations based on the Itanium processor are donated to selected universities. The universities plan to use the systems in research areas ranging from bio-informatics and neural networks to compilers and cluster computing to computational science and scientific data mining. HP and Red Hat are augmenting the program with donations of Red Hat Linux software to support the deployment of open source software in educational environments. By making the grant resources available to university researchers, HP and Red Hat hope to accelerate the development of next-generation Linux applications for Itanium-based systems. "Open source software demonstrates another dimension of its flexibility when used in an educational environment," said Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer, Red Hat. "Along with cost-of-ownership and IT security advantages for the universities, open source software provides a tremendous platform for academic research that can further advance the applications of Linux." "Illinois is honored to have the opportunity to take part in the Itanium-based Systems Grants Program. HP, Intel and Red Hat are providing an ideal technological engine for our planned research," said Professor Wen-Mei Hwu of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "This grant will enable us to accelerate our research in code optimizations and operating system performance and, in turn, make Itanium-based systems and Linux even more powerful solutions in the research community."