On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
> Dima Pasechnik wrote:
>
>> William,
>> I emailed you few weeks back asking what exactly you mean by Itanium
>> environment, as I was unable to reproduce your problems on an Itanium
>> cluster I have access to--- at least not with gcc.
>> At least not in a stand-alone build of GAP.
>> Intel compilers showed to be trickier.
>>
>> So, once again, what exactly is going wrong with the current GAP on
>> Itanium, in your view?
>>
>> Dmitrii
>
> It might help if you all clarify *exactly* what you mean by "Itanium
> environment". Itanium is a processor, which can run many operating systems.
>
> * Various versions of Windows run on Itanium.
> * HP-UX runs on Itanium
> * There have been versions of Solaris for it, though none officially
> released from Sun.
> * Numerous linux distributions will run on Itanium. (Debian, Redhat, Gentoo
> ...)
> * Others too.
>
First -- Dima -- thanks for all your posts to the sage-* lists. It's
really awesome to have another GAP expert around!
Regarding Itanium and Sage, here's the specific statement from our
README.txt about Sage's "official platform support":
OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
------------------------------
Building of Sage from source is regularly tested on (minimal installs
of) the following platforms:
PROCESSOR OPERATING SYSTEM
x86 32-bit Linux -- Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS (=Red Hat),
Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva
x86_64 64-bit Linux -- Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS (=Red Hat),
Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva
IA-64 Itanium 2 64-bit Linux -- Red Hat, SUSE
x86 Apple Mac OS X 10.5.x
PPC Apple Mac OS X 10.5.x
----------------
In particular, we support running Sage on Itanium 2 with 64-bit RHEL or SUSE.
In order to upgrade the GAP spkg in Sage, we just need an spkg that
can be dropped into the Sage install (i.e., sage -i gap-.spkg) such
that the Sage test suite passes:
make test
...
All tests pass!
Last time with gap-4.4.12 (I think), the spkg worked on everything but
Itanium, where there were serious issues (mainly involving saving
workspaces, I think, which our test suite caught). We couldn't sort
out the issues when making that particular Sage release, so we just
reverted to gap-4.4.10, hoping that things would get fixed by the next
Sage release. (I did write to Steve Linton about the issues, but I
don't think I did a good job following up...) But then we got lazy,
and here we are. But you're clearly not lazy, so I really hope this
gets sorted out.
Note that GAP didn't support Itanium at all 2 years ago. I got access
to some Itanium machines, and then convinced Steve Linton to write new
assembly code so that the memory manager for GAP would work on
Itanium. He graciously did so, for which I'm very thankful.
If you need access to the Itaniums I use for build testing, let me
know (off list) and that can be arranged.
-- William
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