From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:31:33 +0100 Message-ID: From: Rudolf Sykora To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [9fans] plan9 for calculations Topicbox-Message-UUID: cb427c3e-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Hello everybody, I noticed there are some thoughts about using plan9 on supercomputers. For me supercomputers are usually used to do some heavy calculations. And this leads me to a question. What software is then used for programming these calculations? (I mean e.g. linear algebra, i.e. matrix, calculations.) Where can one read about that? More, it also leads me to a (perhaps) simpler question. What is the situations with ordinary machines? Untill now I have used several libraries in linux, all of them somehow based on lapack. I used C language (c-lapack), python (numpy), and now I do some programming in Fortran (Intel MKL). From my experience I would say: writing programs in C is a nightmare (for me next to no-go again), using python with numpy is a breeze, using Fortran (95) is sort of fine. C and Fortran run faster than python, but the factor, when I played with it, surprised me to be sth. like 3x (expecting a worse result). Now I've been thinking, If I were to write sth. in plan9, what would be the way to try? Recently I heard about eigen2 library, which seems to be nice (high performance, few dependencies), but for C++... Thank you for any suggestion Ruda PS.: It could be that plan9, being more a os-research system than anything else, is simply no suitable for such a use (there are no plotting libraries, other utilities). Perhaps it's not a good idea at all to try to use plan9 like that because it would be more work than anything. Maybe using linux for such things with all its tools is just ok. If you share this idea, just say it too, please.