From: Dan Bonachea (bonachea_at_cs_dot_berkeley_dot_edu)
Date: Sun Dec 04 2005 - 04:51:10 PST
At 04:11 PM 12/2/2005, jcduell_at_lbl_dot_gov wrote:
> > Also, for architectures, would there be any interested in supporting
> > the MIPS64 processor? We're going to be using the (somewhat saner!)
> > AMD Opteron, which I believe Berkeley's UPC software already supports,
> > but we're also using the Broadcom 1250 (a.k.a. SiByte SB1) which is a
> > dual-core processor based on the 64-bit MIPS specification.
>
>Our implementation translates UPC into C (with library calls for
>networking), so theoretically, any system with a working C compiler is
>fair game. We often run into various compiler-specific hiccups, and/or
>find that we can implement some hand-written assembly to optimize for a
>particular chip. We're generally interested in our support being as
>wide as possible, so if there's a chip and/or compiler we don't yet
>support and you want us to, we'll add it if we can get an account on a
>system to test with.
Minor correction - Berkeley UPC *has* already been successfully tested on at
least one MIPS64 architecture - the SGI Origin 2000 (running IRIX 6.5). All
you need to do is provide a C compiler that compiles to the desired ABI and in
most cases it should just work automatically - so for example on IRIX with
MIPSPro C you set CC="/usr/bin/cc -64" before configure and everything just
works.
As Jason says, our entire infrastructure is very portable, and in many
cases our "port" to a new chip or UNIX-like OS variant requires no changes at
all. In less common cases a few small tweaks may be necessary, but it's
usually less than a day's work.
If you discover an architecture of interest where Berkeley UPC and/or
GASNet doesn't work as expected, please submit a bug at
http://upc-bugs.lbl.gov and we'll look into it (especially if you can provide
us login access to the hardware of interest).
Dan