From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:48:43 -0500 From: "Eric Van Hensbergen" To: "Lucio De Re" , "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc In-Reply-To: <963d7edc1bf63c7d0f4ad3ea2fba4077@proxima.alt.za> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <13426df10704280209m63416ed7i30a2becbbc72c74c@mail.gmail.com> <963d7edc1bf63c7d0f4ad3ea2fba4077@proxima.alt.za> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 519472d6-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 4/28/07, Lucio De Re wrote: > > No, but you're not going to like the reason. AFAIK nobody misses it, > > because there may not be a single HPC app in widespread use that could > > be run on Plan 9 today. We've been looking. Roman knows more than I do > > on this issue. > > But the question would be whether those applications do use complex > types and thus adding them to KenCC would bring them closer to porting > to Plan 9. At least, that seems a legitimate question. > What Ron is saying is that the problem with making most HPC apps work on Plan 9 are not C language features -- its the lack of support for popular languages for doing HPC work. Fortran is the 1000 lbs gorilla here, although there are quite a few C++ codes as well. The second problem is the lack of support for certain libraries -- like OpenMP and MPI -- which are heavily reliant on POSIX features that are the least compatible with Plan 9 (posix threads, BSD sockets, signals, mmap, etc.) > > Or are you saying that no HPC app comes even remotely close to being > portable? > There are multiple degrees of portability. Most of the world considers POSIX the portability layer (and APE won't cut it on our end for the reasons stated above). But even then, HPC apps are large and complex beasts -- most take a few weeks to a month to figure out how to compile and tune even on a "standard" system. The problem is there is increasingly less diversity on the UNIX OS space, so the "standard" is rapidly moving from POSIX to Linux/X11. -eric