Yes I remember when Nvidia posted that post so they could better support
their hardware on FreeBSD, but at least a few FreeBSD developers slammed
the Nvidia poster for reasons that appeared to me to be quite unreasonable.
While I have not tracked what came out of all that I assumed very little.
It reminds me of when OpenBSD got a huge financial contribution to do a
few projects for DARPA that would of helped the OpenBSD OS in a bunch of
security and related features, but the leader of OpenBSD was arguably
'immature' about where the money was coming from and thus lost the
financial contribution, due to some comments he made publicly.
These things happen on open projects like these, in theory you will
always have people who hate larger bodies of power and I guess its OK
for them to voice their opinions, but there should be some good upper
leader ship to take advantage of these opportunities, ideally.
Mike
Unga wrote:
Hi all supercomputing interested guys and gals
You may have seen this:
1. University of Antwerp makes 4000EUR NVIDIA
supercomputer
(http://www.dvhardware.net/article27538.html)
2. FASTRA GPU SuperPC
(http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html)
I would like to first quote following from
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/specs.html :
"Software overview
------------------
We selected Windows XP-64 as the operating system for
FASTRA. There were three reasons for choosing this
platform: first, we needed a 64-bit operating system,
in order to utilize 8GB of RAM. Second, we expected
fewer driver issues on Windows compared to Linux.
Third, within the Windows product line, Windows Vista
is not yet supported by the NVIDIA GPU Computing
platform, leaving Windows XP as the only choice. For
development, we use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. The
core functionality for our CPU code is written in C++
(Visual C++), while MATLAB is often used as a
front-end for rapid prototyping. All GPU code is
developed using the NVIDIA CUDA framework
(http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html), a
C-like programming language that allows for efficient
programming of the NVIDIA GPUs."
This opportunity make it available to FreeBSD users
has many great benefits. We can use FreeBSD, AMD64 and
Nvidia combination at an affordable price for great
many computational intensive tasks such as compilation
(FreeBSD has a parallel make), rendering, encoding,
etc. Of course such supercomputational-ready software
should be available first. But the question is, is the
FreeBSD infrastructurally ready for that?
FreeBSD runs on amd64. But we have following issues:
1. Nvidia doesn't release a driver for amd64.
2. The NVIDIA CUDA framework
(http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html), is not
available for FreeBSD, but it is available for Linux
and Mac OSX. So porting CUDA to FreeBSD may not be a
big issue.
To resolve the above two issues:
1. FreeBSD should proactively address following
issues:
-
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html
- http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests
I don't understand why the the FreeBSD project does
not organize a Google SoC style project to address the
above issues, invite few developers to join the
project, either use FreeBSD donated funds or seeks
fresh funds for the project (AMD and Nvidia will sure
donate if requested as they are direct beneficiaries).
The project could be at least to be targeted to commit
for upcoming FreeBSD 8.0. I would like to understand
why organize such a project is very difficult and what
are the issues regarding that.
2. Once above point 1. is fixed, I'm sure the Nvidia
will port the CUDA framework to FreeBSD and release a
driver for amd64. If not FreeBSD project/foundation
can request from Nvidia.
Kind regards
Unga
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