[daip] aips on linux/amd64, multihost site

[Vincent McIntyre]

Hi

a couple of questions about linux on amd64, for multi-machine sites.

The setup:

We have some sparc and some i[3456]86 machines, in separate sites
(because of the endianness differences in the AIPS on-disk data formats).
All share the same $AIPS_ROOT, otherwise. This works well.

We are now considering putting in some amd64 machines.
However the install.pl script appears not to distinguish i386 and amd64,
in the sense that it sets $ARCH="LINUX" for both. So if I understand
correctly, if one were to try to build AIPS from source on an amd64 
machine, for the same site as the i386 installation, this action would
overwrite the existing binaries for i386.

The questions:

1. Is it a supported configuration to run linux i386 binaries on amd64?
    I'm expecting "no" but thought I should ask to be sure.

2. Assuming we set up amd64 binaries in a separate site, would it be
    possible to access AIPS data files from both i386 and amd64 hosts,
    without corrupting the data files? The data files would be accessed
    over NFS.

3. While I was looking into this I noticed there was no simple listing
    of "supported architectures" on the website[1] aside from [2] which
    doesn't mention amd64.
    Is it worth reworking [2] as a bullet-list (derived from install.pl)?
    It might be better to break that list out into a separate file (eg [3])
    and just linking to it from the current release info file (ie [2]).

Thanks for your time,
Vince

[1] http://www.aips.nrao.edu/
[2] http://www.aips.nrao.edu/dec07.shtml#quickstart
[3] http://www.aips.nrao.edu/supported_platforms.html