[Beowulf] Quad-Core Parallelism

[Joe Landman]

Greetings Don:

Donald Shillady wrote:
> I am wondering if there is any work on software for true parallism at 
> the software level on any of the new Quad-Core chips?  Unfortunately, 
> during my career since 1965 I have tried to write my own software and 
> avoided using canned software and that has served me well in changing 
> over many different systems so parallel ESSL does me little good and I 
> would have to recode a lot of things to use the ESSL routines.  I am now  

ESSL is/was generally only available to IBM customers on AIX machines 
(Power class).  I am not sure if it (ESSL) is even still current.  ESSL 
provided parallel matrix routines, as well as parallel FFT and a few 
others.  If there are specific routines or functions you need in 
parallel (because they consume so much time relative to the rest of the 
code), please indicate what they are.  In most cases, a little extra 
coding can help you leverage some of the excellent open source library 
development out there.

RGB will likely point you to GSL, though last I looked (several months 
ago) GSL is not parallelized (MPI or OpenMP).

> retired but still using WATCOM f77 for coding quantum chemistry under 
> WINDOWS.  I have spent many years on UNIX variants whether HP or SGI 

Ok.  I last used watfor in 1994 or so.

> systems and I have installed LINSPIRE on my PC so I could switch to 
> REDHAT LINUX with little trouble.  The question is whether ESSL or 
> Parallel-ESSL is needed to do true parallel computing on a Quad-core 
> chip?  Basically I would like to know if anyone is working on making a 

If I use the substitution ESSL -> parallel library for X, where X = { 
matrix, fft, ... }, the answer is no, you can (quite easily) write/run 
your own code in parallel on existing systems.  You can use canned open 
source libraries to run parallel versions of various algorithms.

> Quad-core CPU parallel (preferably f77 or f99) under RedHat LINUX?  If I 
> install RedHat LINUX on a Quad-core CPU (thus avoiding a high speed 
> switch) what would be needed to run parallel f77, a new compiler?

Not really, though I recommend gcc 4.2 and higher, as they include a 
functional OpenMP implementation.  I hope to be able to point to an 
article on this on a web site soon (covering all aspects from getting 
the compiler, building and installing it, through using it for simple 
parallel programming).

Joe

>  
> Don Shillady
> Emeritus Professor of Chemistry
> Virginia Commonwealth University
> 
> 
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