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[ccp4bb]: CCP4 - Pentium4 SUMMARY



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Following is a summary of responses to my inquiry regarding peoples
experiences with compiling and running CCP4 on a linux-based P4 system.  The
bottom-line seems to be that it should not be a problem, provided that
proven OS and compilers are used.  Many thanks, again,  for everyone's fast
and informative responses!

Cheers,

Steve Soisson

>From Dave Lawson:

We have been using the pre-compiled binaries on PIII and P4 machines running
RedHat Linux 7.2. So far we haven't had any serious problems.

>From Alun Ashton:

I don't think its the processor that could be the problem but the OS! what
OS do you intend to use?
A quick look at the CCP4 ftp server logs show that there has been 179
downloads of the 4.2.1a release for windows since its recent release. And
minimal problem reports (fewer still if I ignroe the win98 ones!).
This compares with 464 downlaods of the Linux binaries. Obviously lots
more people will have taken the uncompiled ccp4 4.2.1 file (914 people)  
but who knowswhat OS thats for. The CCP4 Linux binaries have been compiled
on my 7.3 RedHat system with the compiler gcc2.96-110. (I will try to
upgrade/break my machine to 8.0 later this week.)
Some people prefer SuSE (to name but one) but I doubt any flavour of Linux
will help the speed of the programs running.
The biggest speedup for programs running on Linux is to have them compiled
with the Intel compilers (I think these are only available for RedHat?).
There is no standard setup support for Intel compilers in CCP4 as yet, but
it is possible to compile CCP4 4.2.1 as described in Clemen's web pages

http://www.globalphasing.com/people/vonrhein/ccp4/

regards,
Alun

And a follow-up from Alun:

you may just want to check that they [the intel compilers] do only work on
redhat. they
certainly only came as RPMs (redhat package manager) last I looked. the
speed inclrease for some programs is reportedly >20percent. The current
version of beast compiled with intel doesnt work but I have some fixes to
try for that as well...


>From Klaas (sorry I didn't get your last name Klaas!)

Well, strictly speaking, I'm using a AMD Athlon XP (beter floating point
performance), but that shouldn't be the problem.
The bottom line was:
It sort of works out of the box with the g77 compiler or the f2c script
(both are preprocessors preparing the fortran code for the c-compiler), you
should invest in more decent (=native) fortran compilers for optimal
performance (and sometimes accuracy, although I didn't find any problems yet
except foramore. This program uses large arrays in a way c-compilers don't
like at all, so the performance is very slow. It seems to get there in the
end, though)
Another conclusion was that if you have sufficient funding and more than
about 5 to 8 crystallographers, you might take system maintenance into
account and consider buying a HP/compaq/digital alpha machine.
Good compilers can be found looking for the Portland group compilers or the
intel compilers. I believe the Portland one is recommended by the ShelX
group.
Ah yes. Since memory is cheap, put plenty of it into your machine.

>From Petr Skokan:

We are running a CCP4, the new version, without problems on PIV machine
with Mandrake Linux. I didn't encountered any problems even with
compilation.




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