As an organization representing the research computing communities in government, industry, and academy, Gelato's primary objective is to be responsive to community needs and interests. By working together to meet real-world problems and application needs, we strive to achieve a balance between long-term and short-term goals with attention to both cutting-edge research and the long-term perspective. Gelato is not only dedicated to the principles of open-source research, we are committed to producing fully open-source working code for the research community.

With members from almost every continent on the globe, the work of the Federation centers around five main focus areas: compilers, parallel filesystems, performance and scalability in a box, performance and scalability in a cluster, and grid computing. Within these areas, Gelato Members are applying new technology and solutions to specific applications in bioinformatics, high-energy physics, and atmospheric sciences. Below is a list of our members' current projects.