Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 19:19:31 -0500 From: "Allen Smith" <easmith@beatrice.rutgers.edu> To: Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>, chuckr@mat.net (Chuck Robey) Cc: nate@mt.sri.com, sthaug@nethelp.no, bright@hotjobs.com, bs_13943_34262@adimus.de, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fortran in the base system (was Re: sysinstall) Message-ID: <9812161919.ZM6960@beatrice.rutgers.edu> In-Reply-To: Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> "Re: Fortran in the base system (was Re: sysinstall)" (Dec 16, 5:45pm) References: <199812162203.OAA75899@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>
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On Dec 16, 5:45pm, Steve Kargl (possibly) wrote: > [Attributes might be screwed here] > > According to Chuck Robey: > > On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, Nate Williams wrote: > > > > > > Read what I said. It is only used by engineers that have already > > > existing Fortran code. It doesn't mean new code isn't written, but the > > > new code that is written tends to be written by folks who already have > > > written lots of Fortran code. > > > > Actually, besides the mountain of legacy code, it vectorizes (where ANSI > > C doesn't) onto supercomputers, so academics are often into Fortran. > > These guys (from my own experience) want big workstations, and aren't > > really terribly interested in PC-based OSs. A smallish program to them > > is 200 megs in size. > > Dual PII 450 MHz with 1 GB memory. You're hits some serious computing > power. The Portland Group sells HPF (high performance Fortran) for > SMP systems and clusters for linux. I haven't tried HPF yet, but > PGI's F90 compiler works under our linux emulation. As well as engineering, a lot of biochemistry (molecular modelling, energy minimization, structure prediction, etcetera) code is written in Fortran. Given the cost of swap space and memory on non-PC machines, and that energy minimization takes a _lot_ of swap space (and, preferably, memory) even for small molecules (we've got about a gig of combined memory and swap space on one of our machines that's used a lot for this, and it keeps running out...), we've been looking at the possibility of getting in a FreeBSD-based machine for just this purpose. A good Fortran compiler would be a necessity for this, although it might be worth buying something with automatic parallelization. (With such an automatic parallelizer, an equivalent of Beowulf for FreeBSD would be quite nice also - it would enable using lots of much cheaper non-Intel microprocessors, one per machine.) -Allen -- Allen Smith easmith@beatrice.rutgers.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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