[daip] Installing AIPS on AMD-64 system

[Eric Greisen]

Sharmila Goedhart writes:

 > My home pc is an AMD-64 running SUSE 9.3. I wanted to try learn more about
 > the AIPS management side of things without breaking anything at work so
 > wanted to install AIPS at home. (Also AMD-64s are really fast) I tried
 > installing AIPS using the install wizard but the architecture was not
 > recognised.  Is is possible to run AIPS on the 64-bit systems, or should I
 > just give up?  If it is possible, what do I need to do?
 > 

As promised - a bit more info.  AIPS uses dynamic memory in Fortran
which is a bit difficult.  It has worked well on 32-bit computers and
some 64-bit architectures (e.g. DEC alphas).  On others, malloc
returns addresses at the opposite end of the 64-bit address range from
those used for the main program.  At present this breaks things in AIPS
although I have a plan to fix most of that problem.  I know how to fix
all of the problem, but it will be a lot of work and it remains to see
if we will undertake that level of effort.

NRAO is in the process of buying an AMD 64 machine ourselves, although
I suspect that we will not run SUSE on it.  We are migrating to RedHat
Enterprise at present.  I have no idea what will happen in this malloc
question on your or our AMD installation.  If malloc uses low
addresses, AIPS will already work.  If not, 31DEC05 AIPS will in time
work except that FRING may not be able to do the largest problems.

Eric Greisen