[Beowulf] OS for 64 bit AMD

[Joe Landman]

Mike Davis wrote:
> What are the good reasons not to have g77 in gcc4? I admit ignorance on 
> the subject of gcc4, but g77 is useful to many in the scientific and 
> academic communities.

Hi Mike:

   g77 does not work with the tree-ssa branch that gcc4 is emerging/has 
emerged from (please correct me if I am wrong about the details on this 
Greg/Toon/others).  gfortran is going to take its place (again please 
correct me if this statement is not correct).  c.f. 
http://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html and related and the mailing list 
archives at http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/fortran/ and 
http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/ .  The idea is that gfortran is a f95 
compiler to supplant g77 (an f77 + some f90 extensions) due in large 
part to the issues in carrying forward a pure f77 compiler when many in 
the fortran world are at/beyond f95.  That is, fortran will be 
available, but the compiler appears to be an f95 compiler going forward.

   That said, there are excellent commercial compilers available from 
Greg's company (PathScale), the Portland Group (been playing with v6.0), 
Intel for their processors, and others on the x86/AMD64/IA64 stream. 
For those of the PPC persuasion, the IBM compilers are quite good.

Joe

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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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