[Beowulf] newbie

[Chris Samuel]

----- "John Hearns" <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:

> A commercial compiler - Intel / Pathscale /Portland
> will always give you better performance from an application.

The feedback from a number of our users on our Barcelona/
Shanghai cluster is that GCC beats the Intel compilers
hands down [1] and that the PGI ones don't tend to hold
a significant margin over GCC either.

Interestingly using the -march=amdfam10 option in GCC 4.3.3
to emit Barcelona specific optimisations produces real
application code that runs slower than the standard
optimisation options (confirmed by a couple of users).

I've built GCC 4.4.0, but we've not tested with it
(or announced it to users) yet.

[1] - Not surprising, it's hardly their home turf. ;-)

cheers,
Chris
-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency