Project Trillian was an effort by an industry consortium to port the Linux kernel to the Itanium processor. The project started in May 1999 with the goal of releasing the distribution in time for the initial release of Itanium, then scheduled for early 2000. By the end of 1999, the project included Caldera Systems, CERN, Cygnus Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux Systems. The project released the resulting code in February 2000. The code then became part of the Linux baseline kernel more than a year before the release of the first Itanium processor. The Trillian project was able to do this for two reasons: