From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jun 19 06:41:27 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EFC591065674 for ; Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:41:27 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from nslay@comcast.net) Received: from QMTA06.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net (qmta06.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net [76.96.62.56]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A6F218FC2D for ; Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:41:27 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from nslay@comcast.net) Received: from OMTA03.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.62.27]) by QMTA06.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast id fiHd1Z0040bG4ec5600d00; Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:25:25 +0000 Received: from LIGHTBULB.LOCAL ([68.35.224.189]) by OMTA03.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast id fiRQ1Z00345o48c3PiRRo4; Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:25:25 +0000 X-Authority-Analysis: v=1.0 c=1 a=LSE61Ltq-EbBztVKdx4A:9 a=IACs0jcgBAG_8IM39joA:7 a=pPc7IFpVG_r1Ol-FAYg9TBKTK38A:4 a=50e4U0PicR4A:10 Message-ID: <4859FB92.4050708@comcast.net> Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:24:18 -0400 From: Nathan Lay User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (X11/20080505) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: High Performance Computing X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:41:28 -0000 Hi list, I'm a grad student at the School of Computational Science (a poorly chosen name for scientific computing) at FSU. My interests, while not necessarily scientific, is in machine learning. I work on software that trains classifiers on an 8 core Xeon machine and consumes about 15GB of RAM (needed when you train with 103k features!). All the development is presently done on Windows XP64, but I will eventually have to make the software cross platform. We ideally want to use icc (not the old one in ports!) or some other high performance compiler, but these simply don't exist on FreeBSD...we will unfortunately have to use Linux. Words can't even begin describe how gcc doesn't compare to compilers like icc or suncc. I'm very worried that FreeBSD will never take ahold in the HPC community, especially as computers ship with more cores (where FreeBSD is shining!) and make OpenMP, HPF, and similar more attractive than MPI. What can be done to expose FreeBSD to the HPC community? How can we get Intel, Sun and others to support HPC on FreeBSD? I really look forward to the day that FreeBSD runs on that 8 core machine, I'd like to see SMPng at work :) Best Regards, Nathan Lay