[daip] Solaris x86

[Patrick P. Murphy]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2000 15:07:58 -0800 (PST), computer support
    <help at astro.UCLA.EDU> said: 

> Do you know if (the latest version of) AIPS has been compiled
> (and run) successfully under Solaris on an Intel CPU?  Thanks.

Yes, it has.  SOL86 is the architecture, though it was done with the GNU
compilers (if I remember correctly).  Here are the relevant CHANGE.DOC
entries:

10254.  May 14, 1999          Solaris 2.x on PCs           Chris
        Added support for Solaris on PCs. The operating system
        interfaces for Solaris on i86 are identical to those for Solaris
        on SPARC; the only change needed for AIPS is a new ZDCHI2 that
        sets BYTFLP to indicate that the host is little-endian.
           Added APLSOL86 to hold the new ZDCHI2.
           Added SYSSOL86 for compiler scripts etc.
           Changes INSTEP1 in INSUNIX to recognize i86 platform for
        Solaris.
           Modified the Makefile for XAS to recognize the SOL86
        platform.
           Added a SOL86 section to FDEFAULTS.SH in SYSUNIX.
           The compilation scripts assume that g77 and gcc are used as
        the FORTRAN 77 and C compilers (tested with egcs 1.1.2).
        Moved nowhere.

10513.  February 25, 2000   Compilation under Solaris/IA32  Chris
        Added support for the Portland Group compilers to
        SYSSOL86:CCOPTS.SH, SYSSOL86:LDOPTS.SH, and SYSUNIX:FDEFAULTS.SH.
        Also added a version of ZTPWAD.FOR to APLSOL86 that will recognize
        the deviant end-of-file code from pgf77 as well as the normal
        negative values.

So I stand corrected: it works with both GNU compilers and the Portland
Group compilers (the latter cost money and are proprietary).

That said, I believe that nobody is impressed at the performance of SOL86
with GNU compilers when compared to an equivalent Linux system on the same
hardware (this shows that GNU compilers are highly tuned to Intel/Linux
but not so for Intel/Solaris).  While the pgf77 compiler did provide some
speedup, my vague recollection is that this was not quite enough to make
it "interesting" compared to the free Intel/Linux/g77 alternative.  So we
never pursued this further.

				- Pat