HPC on FreeBSD - proposal to EPSRC

["C. Bergström"]

Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> This post is primarily directed at people in the UK.
>
> EPSRC UK (Engineering and Physical Sciences
> Research Council) issued HPC Software
> Development Call for 2010/11. From their
> site:   
> 	"This call invites proposals for
> 	High Performance Computing (HPC)
> 	software development to enable
> 	science and engineering."
>
> For full details see:
>
> http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Calls/2010/HPCSoftwareDevelopmentCall.pdf
>
> I indend to draft a proposal for this call.
> I'm particularly interested in making
> HPC on FreeBSD ia64 a reality.
>
> Briefly, I want to propose development
> of an optimising MPI/OpenMP C/c++/Fortran
> compiler for a fbsd/ia64 cluster environment,
> probably based on llvm/clang. 
>
> If you are in UK academia and want to participate,
> or if you are in business and might consider
> supporting a proposal of this sort
> (e.g. a letter of support) please get in touch  
> directly.
>
> If you have other FreeBSD based
> ideas suitable for this call - I'd also
> love to hear.
>   
We (PathScale) have intentionally stripped the IA64 code generation out 
of our source base, but have a AMD64/Intel64 FreeBSD port that is in 
testing.  Unfortunately, including the IA64 codegen back into our source 
would be problematic for licensing reasons.  I only chime in because I 
thought LLVM had removed IA64 from upstream as well.

We have a lot of infrastructure to do optimal register allocation and 
many things for IA64, but lack time to invest in it internally.  I'm 
happy to help anyone who is generally interested in this though..

Best,

./C