FreeBSD, GPGPU and OpenCL/CUDA
Hartmann, O.
ohartman at mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de
Mon Aug 16 20:51:25 UTC 2010
On 08/16/10 16:50, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 05:33:33PM +0300, Ivan Klymenko wrote:
>>> I think it might be worthwhile to contact nVidia directly about this.
>>> To raise awareness that there are people using FreeBSD for HPC and
>>> that they very much would like to see OpenCL/CUDA supported.
> how is this different from getting e.g. native Flash or Matlab on FBSD?
> We've been trying to "raise awareness" for years..
>
I do not know any scientific group using FreeBSD anymore. Most of those
groups used FreeBSD changed to Linux (mostly Redhat, some Ubuntu). Watching
Phoronix and their benchmarks speaks clear what OS is the first choice.
Well, I like the staright forward, centralised organization and the
academic heritage
of the BSDs and I would miss ZFS.
The essence is: there is no serious reason to convince compiler vendors
or vendors of 3D graphics chips of supporting FreeBSD for a specific
purpose if there is
no need -statistically. AMD/ATi in conjunction with OpenCL/LLVM was a
great hope since the GPU vendor offered 3D specs of their chips to
opensource vendors.
But on the other hand nVidia seems to be much better supported by
Gallium3D these days although they haven't offered internal 3d specs.
I'm confused and at the
end I have to decide. At the moment the comunity of astronomers and
astrophysicist is sharing several very interesting N-body simulation
code based on CUDA (open source)
but users and maybe rare scientists still using FreeBSD are excluded
from using those benefits.
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