A beowulf for parallel instruction.

Martin Siegert siegert at sfu.ca
Thu Nov 2 10:45:56 PST 2000


(please, anybody correct me, if I'm wrong)

> is there are freely available fortran 90 compiler? or a fortran compiler
> with cray-pointer support that is freely available too?

No, there isn't.
There is the VAST/f90 "compiler" (http://www.psrv.com/lnxf90.html)
which is really a f90 -> f77 translator that uses g77 as the underlying
compiler, which is a very bad choice [IMHO; you spend lots of money to
get the bleeding edge hardware and then use a compiler that generates
code that is 1.6 to 4 times slower (depending on the program) than the
code generated by a descent commercial compiler. You are far better off,
if you send a little bit less on hardware and invest that money in a
descent f90 compiler].

The situation will vastly improve as soon as IA64 hardware (itanium)
becomes available. Because than you can use the SGI compilers
(http://oss.sgi.com/projects/Pro64) with all the goodies you asked for.

Unfortunately SGI didn't make those compilers available for IA32.
Too bad.

Martin Siegert
Academic Computing Services                        phone: (604) 291-4691
Simon Fraser University                            fax:   (604) 291-4242
Burnaby, British Columbia                          email: siegert at sfu.ca
Canada  V5A 1S6




More information about the Beowulf mailing list