> Hi all supercomputing interested guys and gals
>
> You may have seen this:
> 1. University of Antwerp makes 4000EUR NVIDIA
> supercomputer
> (
http://www.dvhardware.net/article27538.html)
>
> 2. FASTRA GPU SuperPC
> (
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html)
>
>
> I would like to first quote following from
>
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/specs.html :
>
> "Software overview
> ------------------
>
> We selected Windows XP-64 as the operating system for
> FASTRA. There were three reasons for choosing this
> platform: first, we needed a 64-bit operating system,
> in order to utilize 8GB of RAM. Second, we expected
> fewer driver issues on Windows compared to Linux.
> Third, within the Windows product line, Windows Vista
> is not yet supported by the NVIDIA GPU Computing
> platform, leaving Windows XP as the only choice. For
> development, we use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. The
> core functionality for our CPU code is written in C++
> (Visual C++), while MATLAB is often used as a
> front-end for rapid prototyping. All GPU code is
> developed using the NVIDIA CUDA framework
> (
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html), a
> C-like programming language that allows for efficient
> programming of the NVIDIA GPUs."
>
> This opportunity make it available to FreeBSD users
> has many great benefits. We can use FreeBSD, AMD64 and
> Nvidia combination at an affordable price for great
> many computational intensive tasks such as compilation
> (FreeBSD has a parallel make), rendering, encoding,
> etc. Of course such supercomputational-ready software
> should be available first. But the question is, is the
> FreeBSD infrastructurally ready for that?
>
> FreeBSD runs on amd64. But we have following issues:
> 1. Nvidia doesn't release a driver for amd64.
>
> 2. The NVIDIA CUDA framework
> (
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html), is not
> available for FreeBSD, but it is available for Linux
> and Mac OSX. So porting CUDA to FreeBSD may not be a
> big issue.
>
> To resolve the above two issues:
> 1. FreeBSD should proactively address following
> issues:
> -
>
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html
> -
http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests
>
> I don't understand why the the FreeBSD project does
> not organize a Google SoC style project to address the
> above issues, invite few developers to join the
> project, either use FreeBSD donated funds or seeks
> fresh funds for the project (AMD and Nvidia will sure
> donate if requested as they are direct beneficiaries).
> The project could be at least to be targeted to commit
> for upcoming FreeBSD 8.0. I would like to understand
> why organize such a project is very difficult and what
> are the issues regarding that.
>
> 2. Once above point 1. is fixed, I'm sure the Nvidia
> will port the CUDA framework to FreeBSD and release a
> driver for amd64. If not FreeBSD project/foundation
> can request from Nvidia.
>
> Kind regards
> Unga
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
freebsd-chat@freebsd.org mailing list
>
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-chat-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
>
