I've heard rumors of up to 50% performance improvement with native
compilers. Yes that is "up to", yes it's a rumor. I presume that the
difference is due to better results from an optimizer designed for a
specific architecture.
The farm is presently IBM's and Sun's. Maybe in the future they'll all
be linux boxes, but not right now. And I agree with Curtis that for
all of us to fool around with compiler switches is a waste of time,
but for AIX, SunOS, Linux, and HP (JLab flavors all) it's already
done. You write your C and/or FORTRAN and you don't have to worry
about it. And I think that (as Dennis points out) the Linux version
uses gcc. Other platforms could use gcc if the developers bringing the
system up on them prefer and they could copy the linux switches,
couldn't they?
Why change something that works to something potentially slower? A
false consistency ...
-- Mark
Mark M. Ito, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
12000 Jefferson Ave., Mail Stop 12H, Newport News, VA 23606
Email: marki@jlab.org, Office: (757)269-5295, Pager: (757)680-7175