[daip] aips 31DEC07 compiler question

[Eric Greisen]

Joe Cammisa writes:
 > 
 > greetings, eric.  our astronomy department has just purchased a new dell
 > server and hope to soon begin processing their data on it.  unfortunately,
 > as i set out to install the 31DEC07 version of aips, i am reminded that
 > the compiler version used by the install wizard does indeed matter.  the
 > version on this system is gcc-4.1, which is not mentioned on the
 > aips-compiler web page, which gives me pause; worse, when i attempt to
 > assuage my paranoia by grabbing the nrao version of gcc-2.95.3, i am thus
 > far unable to successfully build it; nor (as of this writing) have i been
 > able to build gcc-3.4.4 on this x86_64 rhel system.
 > 
 > therefore, i'm afraid i must ask your advice on this matter:  has aips
 > been successfully compiled on gcc-4.1?  are there other preferable gcc
 > versions that i should be trying to bootstrap?  any pertinent
 > recommendation or information on this matter would be most heartily
 > appreciated.  i sincerely thank you in advance for your time.  best-
 > 

My general recommendation is to do the binary installation unless you
develop your own source code inside the AIPS package.  The binary
codes are produced by the Intel compiler and run faster on essentially
all machines.  This can be 40% or better improvement in performance
over the GNU compiler for threaded PIVs and even 7% for AMD machines
over that produced by the GNU compilers for these machines.  I now use
3.4.x (x >= 3) with good result in the gnu suite but the binaries will
be better for performance.  The binary installation is very simple

        perl install.pl -n

where the -n says do binary (network).  If you have started your
installation, you may need to edit the ~/.AIPSRC file to switch to
binary but it is really simple to use.

Even if you do develop some code locally, I would recommend having a
public area built with the binary installation and a separate
GNU-compiled version for the development.

Eric Greisen