[daip] Installation feedback

[Martin Hardcastle]

Hi folks,

I thought I would drop you a line to comment on my experiences during
the installation of 31DEC06. I decided to try to compile this myself
with the intel compiler (ifort (IFORT) 9.0 20051201) because of the
small AP size in the binary installation (as described in the
AIPSLetter). I now have a working installation which gives a distinct
improvement in speed on my AMD systems, and a top AIPSMark00 of
220 (dual Opteron 250, 2.4 GHz). But it took me longer than I would
have expected to get everything working.

First, I tried to change the compiler to be used in install.pl . It's
not obvious to the user at this point that the right thing to do is
not specify compiler options (since FDEFAULT.SH will over-ride them
anyway if your compiler matches ifort). So I wasted some time trying
to guess sensible options.

Once I'd done this, INSTEP2 ran OK (though in passing I note that the
options that you get from FDEFAULT.SH for ifort are tuned for Pentiums
-- architecture `W' is the best match I've found for the Opterons, and
leaving this out can make a significant difference). But INSTEP4
failed at the linking stage. I was using ifort as the linker, and the
problem seemed to come from linking all the libraries in
$LIBR/*/SUBLIB : it was complaining about unresolved symbols in SUBLIB
libraries, although the symbols were actually there in other libraries
passed to the compiler at the same time. I don't know what was going
on here, and am inclined to blame the Intel compiler, which didn't
seem to be passing all its arguments to ld: however, I had to
hand-tune LDOPTS.SH to reproduce what should have happened with
ifort...

COMPILER="/usr/bin/ld"
LINK="-rpath /usr/local/intel/fc/9.0/lib -L/usr/local/intel/fc/9.0/lib  /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/3.3.5/../../../crt1.o /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/3.3.5/../../../crti.o /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/3.3.5/crtbegin.o /usr/local/intel/fc/9.0/lib/for_main.o -dynamic-linker /lib/ld-linux.so.2 -Bstatic -lifport -lifcore -Bdynamic -limf -lm -Bstatic -lirc -Bdynamic -lc -Bstatic -lirc_s -Bdynamic -ldl -lc /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/3.3.5/crtend.o /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/3.3.5/../../../crtn.o -lsvml"

This was finally enough to get things working.

This isn't meant to be any sort of complaint -- I recognise that I'm
trying to do something off the beaten track and that most people will
either put up with the small AP size in the binary installation or
compile with g77. My major problem with the linking seems to be one
that I guess you haven't encountered. However, since you are using the
Intel compiler at NRAO, I wondered if it would be worth putting a few
notes on how you would do an installation from source on the web, and
maybe some comments on the choice of compiler options?

Regards,

Martin