[Swarm-Support] Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Problems importing Swarm to high performance systems

[Bill Northcott]

I have echoed your message back to the Swarm support list where it 
belongs.
On 20/03/2004, at 6:43 AM, address@hidden wrote:

> Hello all,
> A number of researchers have recently asked the research computing
> specialist here at the U of A to install SWARM on one of the school's
> high performance computing systems.  He's expressed concern that his OS
> might be incompatible with the 4 year old SWARM release.  After working
> on it for a couple of days with little success, he asked if I
The old code won't work with a modern OS.  You need either a recent 
snapshot, or pull the code off the CVS.  
(http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm)

Paul Johnson has binaries for Linux, the Swarm ftp site has binaries 
for Windows and I have binaries for MacOS X.


> 1) DEC Alpha, Digital Unix 5.1
>
> OSF1 V5.1 2650 alpha

I had Swarm working on our Alphaserver 8400/625 a couple of years back 
under Tru64 v4.0.  The 5.0 and 5.1 upgrades broke everything including 
the gcc compiler.

Three or four months back, I had a go under 5.1A.    I got stuck with 
what I now believe are issues with builtin functions in the gcc 
compiler.  These also affected MacOS X and will probably affect any 
RISC processor system.  Time ran out, but I intend to finish the job.

If you want to have a go, you will need:
gnumake 3.78 or later
gperf
gnu sed 3.02 or later
gcc 3.3 or 3.4  (see below)
emacs
Tcl/tk  any 8.x version
BLT2.4
HDF5 is nice and not hard to build but not essential.

Don't bother with the HP/Compaq/DEC/NomduJour opensource disk it is so 
far out of date as to be laughable.

In addition, if you want to build from CVS sources, you will need:
autoconf 2.55 or later
automake 1.6.1 or later
gnu libtool 1.5 or later
bison
m4

gcc is absolutely necessary.  No other compiler will do because, apart 
from Objective-C, Swarm uses some gcc only features.  in particular gcc 
has some 'builtin' functions which can be used to build foreign 
language interfaces.  The ones used in Swarm are __builtin_apply_args 
__builtin_apply and __builtin_return.

These functions have always had problems on RISC processor machines and 
for a number of years the gcc maintainers have wanted to ditch them and 
use libffi instead.  (libffi is included in gcc sources) This is hung 
up by delays assigning the ownership of libffi from Redhat to FSF.  
Recent versions of gcc have had badly broken builtins on RISC machines, 
but a few months back some of the maintainers seem to have decided to 
fix them and a lot of new code has been written.  The promise is that 
they will be fixed in the 3.4 release, which is imminent.  So there is 
a good chance reported bugs in this area will get fixed.  If you find 
any please report them.

If you want to have a go, the best route to get a good compiler now is 
to search the last year in Bugzilla (the gcc bug reporting system) for 
the builtin functions mentioned above and apply the patches you find to 
a recent gcc-3.3.x source.  Bug nos 11151, 12210 and 12503 are all 
relevant, but there may be others.  (gcc 2.x compilers will not work at 
all on Tru64 5.1).

If you get hung up, ask again on this support list.  If you feel like 
helping to replace the builtins with libffi calls, please email me 
direct.  I need to get Swarm running on the Alphaserver for my 
supervisor.  So I will be back to it.

> 2) Red Hat Linux, Linux kernel 2.4.24-tm2 #1 SMP
>
> glibc-devel-2.2.5-34
> glibc-common-2.2.5-34
> glibc-2.2.5-34
> compat-glibc-6.2-2.1.3.2
> gcc-2.96-110
> gcc-g77-2.96-110
> gcc-c++-2.96-110
> gcc-objc-2.96-110

Linux should be easier, or you can just get a binary.

> 3) SUN Solaris, SunOS 5.8 Generic_108528-27 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-80

I don't think Swarm has been built recently on Solaris SPARC, but it 
certainly has in the past.  I suspect the issues will be similar to 
those on Tru64.

Bill Northcott