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:
-
[ message continues ]
" title="http://lists.freeb...
">http://lists.freeb...
