Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 15:36:57 -0500 (CDT) From: Guy Helmer <ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov> To: "Alton, Matthew" <Matthew.Alton@anheuser-busch.com> Cc: "'Hackers@FreeBSD.ORG'" <Hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: DIY Supercomputers Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.96.980818145941.20758D-100000@demios.scl.ameslab.gov> In-Reply-To: <31B3F0BF1C40D11192A700805FD48BF90177663A@STLABCEXG011>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Alton, Matthew wrote: > Has anybody taken a look at the possibility of porting Beowulf > http://www.beowulf.org > to FreeBSD? Or are we clustering like the very wind our own selves someplace? The basic message-passing software on which parallel processing applications are typically built, MPI (e.g. MPICH or LAM implementations) or PVM, ought to work on FreeBSD (I've personally used MPICH on FreeBSD). I haven't personally needed for some of the Beowulf enhancements (Ethernet "channel bonding", vm pre-pager), although the unified PID space would be useful, and FreeBSD has kernel support for reading the Pentium performance counters. The biggest objection I've heard to using FreeBSD for parallel processing clusters was the lack of a FreeBSD version of a certain commercial Fortran compiler. FreeBSD (with net.inet.tcp.delack_enabled=0 in 3.0-current) ought to have better network performance over the entire spectrum of message sizes than Linux 2.0.x, so I want to see whether this has an observable effect on parallel apps. Guy Helmer, Graduate Student, Iowa State University Dept. of Computer Science Research Assistant, Ames Laboratory --- ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~ghelmer To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.SGI.3.96.980818145941.20758D-100000>