Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 11:44:18 +0100 From: "Christoph P. Kukulies" <kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> To: freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: FreeBSD supercomputing Message-ID: <199602231044.LAA20191@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de>
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Our institute is planning a replacement for the existing Ultrix/Alpha/VAX workstation cluster (10Base5 based). Next week we will have meetings on what should be acquired. HP, DEC, IBM, perhaps SGI are on the plan. I want to put an alternative to discussion, namely buying lots of P6, big memory, big disks, 100Mb FAST Ethernet (we also have FDDI connectivity - Fibronics at present). And getting more for the money (around 100,000 USD are to discussion). I would like to gather some thoughts here in this list if such a solution would be feasible, also under the point of view that a bunch of users (ypcat passwd | wc -> 811) have to be supported continously (physicists compiling fortran programs, expecting correct results and having no time to discuss IEEE fp peculiarities or libm.a strangenesses, or perhaps new pentium bugs) OTOH, vendor fortran compilers aren't always as reliable as f2c, par example. There is already a strong L*n*x community I have to cope with and I would also like to gather benchmark data and other arguments pro FreeBSD - I'm under fire anyway for two years now why "*we* make FreeBSD while the other side of the aile is running L*n*x". I always argued with better networking performance, reliability and such. But fact is that some students installed L*n*x on their notebooks because they didn't find their PCMCIA ethernet adapter supported by FreeBSD while it was listed in the L*n*x 'hardware compatibility' list. These are the little needle stings I'm expiriencing every day. Could someone name me some university sites which are preferably running FreeBSD or BSD type Os's and for what reasons? To name again the main issues: - Highspeed networking (100 Mbit, ATM, FDDI) - SMP, clustering , distributed processing. - Numbercrunching (FP issues) - Disk speed Opinions and advice welcome. --Chris Christoph P. U. Kukulies kuku@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de
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