High Performance Computing

[Nathan Lay]

Hi list,
I'm a grad student at the School of Computational Science (a poorly 
chosen name for scientific computing) at FSU.  My interests, while not 
necessarily scientific, is in machine learning.  I work on software that 
trains classifiers on an 8 core Xeon machine and consumes about 15GB of 
RAM (needed when you train with 103k features!).  All the development is 
presently done on Windows XP64, but I will eventually have to make the 
software cross platform.  We ideally want to use icc (not the old one in 
ports!) or some other high performance compiler, but these simply don't 
exist on FreeBSD...we will unfortunately have to use Linux.  Words can't 
even begin describe how gcc doesn't compare to compilers like icc or 
suncc.  I'm very worried that FreeBSD will never take ahold in the HPC 
community, especially as computers ship with more cores (where FreeBSD 
is shining!) and make OpenMP, HPF, and similar more attractive than 
MPI.  What can be done to expose FreeBSD to the HPC community?  How can 
we get Intel, Sun and others to support HPC on FreeBSD?  I really look 
forward to the day that FreeBSD runs on that 8 core machine, I'd like to 
see SMPng at work :)

Best Regards,
Nathan Lay