Matt Olander, CTO of Offmyserver and Brooks Davis, FreeBSD cluster engineer, demonstrate how computers can be used to create a giant supercomputer.
Build a supercomputer with FreeBSD
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What could you run on a FreeBSD cluster? Most scientific computing stuff is written in Fortran, and the only Fortran compiler for FreeBSD is g77 which is Fortran 77 only. Seems pretty worthless
Ahem… http://g95.sourceforge.net/
It’s certainly not production quality yet, but it’s getting there. In the meantime you can always use the Intel compiler through Linux binary compatibility.
Right on.
Keefer,
on top of what bascule said, the bulk of apps in fortan tend to be fortran 77. Adoption of newer versions seams to be slow and over time C++ and or simple used of programs like matlab has slowed creation of fortran programs. But yes it’s still heavily used. I don’t think there is nearly as much fortran 95 code out there as their is fortran 77
Bascule, that’s stupid though! If you have to use Linux emulation in order to run Fortran programs, why not just use the real deal rather than emulating.
brad, you a re totally wrong! Most of the scientific computing programs out there use Fortran 95 nowadays. Fortran 77 is old hat and no one uses it anymore. Besides, g77 is a crappy fortran compiler to begin with.
The Intel Fortran compiler is itself a Linux executable, and must be run through the Linux compatibility layer. However, since it produces ELF x86 executables with a little tweaking to the compiler flags it’s entirely possible to use it to build FreeBSD native executables. Besides, Linux compatibility isn’t really an “emulator”… the only thing being “emulated” is the Linux system call table, which is actually just an implementation of a secondary ELF ABI which sits side-by-side with the FreeBSD native one.
In fact, work is currently underway to allow the FreeBSD kernel to be built with the Intel C Compiler…
Do you have anything to support the mass use of fortran 95? I think the version they teach engineers here is an older one, though most like myself just take C++, often wish I took fortran though. I do know plenty of people working with fortran77 code. I’m sure fortran 95 is used, but there is a massive amount of 77 code that still works just fine today as it did way back, no one is going to re-write things that don’t need it.