[Beowulf] OS for 64 bit AMD

[Mark Hahn]

> f77) is still in use. It's not unusual to have someone come by the 
> office once or twice a semester with some code that is f77 or Fortran 4 
> and want to know if it can run on one of the clusters. Then, of course, 
> we have the whole parallelization discussion. "No it won't just work as 
> a parallel program. Yes we might be able to get some speedup with 
> automated tools and loop unrolling. No the speedup won't be linear, 1+1 
> will not equal 2 for this case. The best speedup would come from a 
> rewrite for mpi, etc. etc. "

same here.  MPI, unfortunately, is such a massive investment to 
someone who is a domain scientist, not a programming freak.
openMP certainly comes in handy, though nontrivial SMP machines 
are nontrivial in price (starting to change with quad opterons,
dual core might make a difference too...)

I notice that Pathscale and PGI both have decent OpenMP support...