[9fans] sparc port, number crunching

[John Stalker <stalker@maths.tcd.ie>]

I am thinking of buying a 12-cpu ultrsparcII unit (E4500) for a
couple of scientific computing projects I am working on.  My OS
choices seem to be
1) Solaris 8, 9, or 10
2) NetBSD
3) Plan9
Option (1) is obviously the safe, conservative option.  Option (3)
would be the most fun.  Anyone have any relevant experience?  From
``the Various Ports'' it seems that I may need to fix up floating
point support in the compiler.  Am I likely to run into other
problems?  I can only expect to get away with option (3) if the
performance is roughly comparable--say, to within a factor of
two--with option (1) and if the amount of systems programming
needed is zero or small.  The main external library which would
need porting is libfftw for the Fast Fourier Transform.
--
John Stalker
University of Dublin, Trinity College
School of Mathematics