Day 1 of Cray XT5 workshop in Berkeley went pretty well, I thought. Cray did a good job with their presentations and there were good discussions. AMD and Cray roadmaps were actually interesting. Good synergy among UC, NERSC/Berkeley lab, Oak Ridge, and U Tenn NSF NICS center.

IBM HPC Best Practices for FORTRAN programmers

IBM gave a presentation to SP-XXL members this morning on the topic of "Best Practices." It went over some of the things you need to be aware of when building FORTRAN programs on AIX. Some of the material was pretty basic, and known to anyone who has worked on AIX, but a number of the slides are excellent references for those worrying about 32-bit vs. 64-bit issues, for example. There are also some very good slides that explain what is and isn't contained the IBM scientific math library, ESSL, relative to the standard linear algebra library package, LAPACK. This gets pretty tricky because of name conflicts between ESSL and LAPACK routine names.
The presentation can be downloaded from our
web site at NERSC, under the Related Information heading.