From owner-freebsd-hackers  Tue Aug 18 16:31:08 1998
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From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb>
Message-Id: <199808182330.QAA27570@hub.freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: DIY Supercomputers
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.3.96.980818145941.20758D-100000@demios.scl.ameslab.gov> from Guy Helmer at "Aug 18, 98 03:36:57 pm"
To: ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov (Guy Helmer)
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 16:30:46 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: Matthew.Alton@anheuser-busch.com, Hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
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Guy Helmer wrote:
> 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.

	please look at Ron Minnich's webpages at
	www.sarnoff.com:8000/docs/metacomputing.html

	and his paper during the FreeNIX track at this summers USENIX.

jmb

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