On Saturday 30 November 2002 12:22 pm, Jens Rehsack wrote: > Marc G. Fournier wrote: > > I'm really growing tired of reading articles talking abot so and > > so creating a super computer of 1400 CPUs running Linux ... > > latest one I read was one that HP setup ... > > > > ... is there software available for FreeBSD that can do this, or > > is this something we are being left behind in? > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > > Some, eg: > net/mpich: Message Passing Interface (MPI) Library > devel/distcc: Distribute compilation of C(++) code acrosss machines > on a network > > Depends on what you want to do. > You could also port beowulf :-)
I thought at some point that beowulf was a port or would run on FreeBSD but couldn't find it right now. Another one is /usr/ports/net/pvm for Parallel Virtual Machine. It depends on how they did it. If you have 1400 cpus running 1400 copies of the OS, you haven't done much. What Cray (don't know what their name is now) did was have 1 cpu run the OS and tell the other 1399 what to do. Cray in their large cpu machines used Alphas as their cpus because they would run a program and duplicate output from one of the mainframe Crays with 16-32 cpus. You sort of had one slug and 1399 dragsters that only had computation on their minds. A compiler that generates code for a pvm environment is something else. Stacking up cpus is only a few % points in the process of generating something useful. What I always wanted was something that had 4 or 5 separate computers and would run something in 1/4 or 1/5 the time. What you usually see is something that will run 4 or 5 jobs as truly parallel processes but all of them ran equally slowly. Sort of like running seti on an SMP. A couple of years ago someone in one of the university computing centers built a parallel system using FreeBSD. They had a web page with images of their computer lab. I couldn't find the URL to it right now. A monte carlo program that I used in the past before I retired comes with mods to run under pvm. You could start a job running and get results on the same day instead of waiting 2 or 3 days for it to finish. Kent -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
