Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:05:21 +0200 From: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net> To: Anton Shterenlikht <mexas@bristol.ac.uk> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: HPC/CUDA on FreeBSD (was: Re: Removal of ICC (intel compiler) bits from mk) Message-ID: <20100820090521.63233enpg5276tes@webmail.leidinger.net> In-Reply-To: <20100819201024.GA20254@mech-cluster241.men.bris.ac.uk> References: <E604222D-A731-4F0E-BF21-FF7F4306A899@gmail.com> <AANLkTimCdcBvgBt1sr2y1_=6fOEGWFFxa=hRwQ5vzyhT@mail.gmail.com> <65F17C45-55C1-4349-A4D1-A3D6AD0D9A80@FreeBSD.org> <4C6C1EB1.5000004@FreeBSD.org> <20100819090128.22597bbvyogdw9wk@webmail.leidinger.net> <86fwybdkt4.fsf@ds4.des.no> <20100819113548.72614imi2zxx9log@webmail.leidinger.net> <20100819201024.GA20254@mech-cluster241.men.bris.ac.uk>
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Hi, I'm taking out arch and some people from the CC and only keep =20 current@. This is getting off topic for the initial thread. Quoting Anton Shterenlikht <mexas@bristol.ac.uk> (from Thu, 19 Aug =20 2010 21:10:24 +0100): > On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:35:48AM +0200, Alexander Leidinger wrote: >> >> Quoting Dag-Erling Sm=C3=83??rgrav <des@des.no> (from Thu, 19 Aug 2010 >> 11:16:23 +0200): >> >> > Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net> writes: >> >> If someone would get icc 11.x up and runnig as a port (similar to wha= t >> >> we have for outdated icc version in the ports collection), I would >> >> have a look if my contact at Intel is still working there in a >> >> position which allows him to get a commercial license for us. >> > >> > Does that really matter? We're not going to start building releases >> > with icc, are we? >> >> It could matter for ports, I do not know if it matters for parts in >> src. The commercial license is also the only way that we could get icc >> installed on machines in the FreeBSD cluster (if there's interest to >> have another compiler *for FreeBSD development* to check the source >> against... the warnng and error messages are better that those of gcc, >> I do not know how they compare to clang). > > If one begins to mention FreeBSD clusters, and moreover FreeBSD HPC, then > this becomes a somewhat different discussion. One of the stubmling > blocks for HPC on FreeBSD (just one of many, perhaps not even the > major one) is a complete lack of good quality commercial compilers. > All we=C3=83'got is gcc or clang. Both are not really that great, and > definitely inferior to commercial compilers, e.g. Intel. What I=C3=83'm > saying is that it would be great if Intel sold a compiler for FreeBSD. > I'd ve bought a copy. But from what others have said, my impression is th= at > the ICC port is unlikely to fill this void. After I (and other people which provided patches) ported icc to =20 FreeBSD someone from IIRC Asia took the port as an example and ported =20 Intels Fortran compiler to FreeBSD in the same way (he was able to use =20 a lot of the icc port, only some minor modifications where necessary). I had the impression that this was used for HPC. > P.S. My interests and expertise are in computational mechanics, not in > compilers, so feel free to correct me if I=C3=83'm wrong. In general: The resulting code (for icc and ifc) was working. The =20 application binary code itself was/is the same (modulo differences in =20 system headers), the "only" things which need to be changed are the =20 startup code and the libs. We managed to do that. > P.P.S. Regarding FreeBSD HPC see also this thead: > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2010-August/220264.= html > (FreeBSD, GPGPU and OpenCL/CUDA) That's not the way we would like it to be, but at least it is possible: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/jhb/2010/07/20/using-cuda-with-the-native-freeb= sdamd64-nvidia-driver/ When I was working on icc, I had an idea about a liblinux2freebsd =20 which would provide common linux-symbols and map them to =20 FreeBSD-equivalents (together with some predefined objdump/objcopy/... =20 scripts to modify linux libs) so that you can take a linux lib and use =20 it to create native FreeBSD programs. Sort of like the NDIS layer in =20 the kernel to run Windows binary drivers. Unfortunately I never got =20 the time to work on this. Something like this could have maybe been =20 used to "mangle" the linux cuda libs to be used on FreeBSD natively. Bye, Alexander. --=20 Neither spread the germs of gossip nor encourage others to do so. http://www.Leidinger.net Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID =3D B0063FE7 http://www.FreeBSD.org netchild @ FreeBSD.org : PGP ID =3D 72077137
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