It's true that raw FP performance isn't the be-all and end-all, but things aren't necessarily memory-bound either. HPC codes at scale are often dominated by co

It's true that raw FP performance isn't the be-all and end-all, but things aren't necessarily memory-bound either. HPC codes at scale are often dominated by communication. I'm surprised if numerical issues are that much of a worry. x86 has now caught up in doing FMA, in particular. I don't know what the build systems actually are, but most of Fedora (and Debian?) is available for POWER, and will typically have at least minimal tests in the package. It's not as if POWER is new for HPC; the Daresbury HPC-X machine was quite high in the top500 15 years or so ago, as an example I was physically close to.