Intel Fortran for Mac OS X - 64 bit?

[Lou_W_]

Hello:

I am fortunate enough to have a new Mac Pro under my desk. I have tested some code snippits, and as I expected, the Intel Fortran compiler does not support addressing more than 2 GBYTES of memory (it is supposed to be a 32 bit system, I know). Actually, it seems to be able to allocated about 800 million words in an array (which is about 2.4 GB???).

Can anyone hint at when to expect the 64 bit version of the compiler now that we have Woodcrest/64 bit for the Mac Pro line?

[TimP]

When we asked this question, the answer was the Intel64 10.0 beta compiler should support MacOS "in a few months."

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I'll pass along your name as someone who is interested in this.

[Lou_W_]

Thanks - I am very interested. I do a lot of atmospheric cloud modeling and prediction on my system, as well as work on other applications associated with numerical weather prediction.

Lou

[Steven_L_Intel1]

You will also need the 64-bit version of MacOS (Leopard?)

[Lou_W_]

Hmm - this is where it gets a bit more convoluted - Mac OS X Tiger is "64 bit" - I think mostly at the Unix level. The Carbon API is still 32 bit, but the underlying OS is 64. Unix stuff can get at the full 64 bit address space, but applications have a harder time if they use the Apply API's.

For example, Absoft is shipping a PPC version of their 9.2 Fortran compiler for Tiger that can address 64 bits. IBM decided that they were not going to invest porting their PPC 32 bit compiler XLF past a 32 bit version (which ran on Panther, and on Tiger unsupported as well). Ironically, they released a 64 bit version of the XLF for PPC Linux.

So I think the overall response is that I hope Intel can use the Mac OS X Tiger's underlying "64-bitness" to produce the Intel 10 for the Mac Pro sooner than the release of Leopard.

Lou

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I will be the first to admit that I know little about the Mac side of things. I do know that there aren't yet released 64-bit development tools (linker, libraries, etc.) on the Intel-based Mac side of the world. Perhaps Leopard isn't required, I don't know for sure. But you do need tools that Apple has not released yet. It will all come when it's ready (and when Apple is ready.)