Supercomputing with FreeBSD?

[Michael Vince]

Yes I remember when Nvidia posted that post so they could better support 
their hardware on FreeBSD, but at least a few FreeBSD developers slammed 
the Nvidia poster for reasons that appeared to me to be quite unreasonable.
While I have not tracked what came out of all that I assumed very little.

It reminds me of when OpenBSD got a huge financial contribution to do a 
few projects for DARPA that would of helped the OpenBSD OS in a bunch of 
security and related features, but the leader of OpenBSD was arguably 
'immature' about where the money was coming from and thus lost the 
financial contribution, due to some comments he made publicly.

These things happen on open projects like these, in theory you will 
always have people who hate larger bodies of power and I guess its OK 
for them to voice their opinions, but there should be some good upper 
leader ship to take advantage of these opportunities, ideally.

Mike


Unga wrote:
> 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 at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-chat-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>