Dear GAP Forum,
I would like to notify you about the porting of gap to VAX/VMS and
ALPHA AXP/OpenVMS enviroments.
This port has been done by me and my colleague/student Pavol Mederly.
As far as the ALPHA AXP/OpenVMS is concerned, we had only 1
day to make the port. The first thing we tried was translate VAX/VMS
image (gap.exe) using VEST (translator from VAX/VMS images to ALPHA
AXP/OpenVMS images). This is not good job, of course, but it could
serve as as the last possibility (this is not what is ALPHA AXP meant
for). The program was running well. (Combinat.tst gave approximately
11000 GAPStones - ALPHA AXP/OpenVMS running on 150 MHz, 64MBytes of memory, O.K.)
Then we tried to compile it from the sources.
The compiler and linker were succesful, there was one linker warning.
I run combinat.tst, no problems, it gave at about 71000
GAPStones at the first run, 73500 at the second run. Even if it was not
new world record, ALPHA seemd to be extermely fast gay.)
After it I made all examples from About Group Chapter of GAP
manual without problems. There were some (many) garbage collections
during the session.
Finally I tried some big arithmetic and I haven't find any mistake.
So, I hope we produced fully functional version of GAP also for
ALPHA AXP/OpenVMS environment (we used patch level 3).
This version would be distributed on DEMO CD ROM by DEC
(together with Announcement). You can get gap.exe (image file for
ALPHA AXP/OpenVMS) from ftp.eunet.sk via anounymous ftp, it resides in
the directory itr/techreports/incoming together with sysvax.c file.
(This is the only file necessary to compile GAP on both VAX/VMS (we did
it on 5.5) and Alpha AXP/OpenVMS and which is not included in usual
distribution.) If you want to run GAP on VAX/Alpha, you have to unpack
*.tar.Z or *.tar.zoo files in UNIX environement and send it to your
VAX/Alpha (e.g. via ftp), BUT AS ASCII files. If you would use binary
transfer, you will have problems with line-feets - you will get
approximately 5 compilation errors. These errors can be fixed easily -
simply remove LF sign from the ends of apropriate lines. (The gap.exe
should be send as binary file.)
I would like to mention one point which could explain
differences (problems) with ALPHA AXP/OSF-1 environment:
The cc on ALPHA AXP/OpenVMS knows only about 16 and 32 bits
integers, there are no 64 bits integers.
Jaroslav Gurican
Dept. Of Algebra & Number Theory
Mlynska dolina
Bratislava
SK- 842 15
P.S.: I would like to express my congratulations (and thanks, as well)
for such clean design of GAP.
P.S.1: GAPStones on some VMS machines ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
First column = first run of GAPu
Second column = another run of GAPu
first raw = first run of the test
second raw = second run of the test
Alpha AXP 3000-500S (118 SPECmark89 (DECchip 21064/150 MHz))
71000 (less than 10 seconds) 71000 73500 72992
MicroVAX 3100/90 (24 VUP - Vax Unit Performance)
25510 (28s) 26099 (27s) 26505 (27s) 27100 (26s)
VAXstation 4000/60 (12 VUP)
12660 (58s) 12697 (57s) 13069 (55s) 13118 (55s)
VAX 6000/420 (2 proccesors 7 VUP each)
9350 (80s) 9422 (77s) 9727 (76s) 9652 (76s)
VAX 4000/200 (4.8 VUP)
5006 (140s) 4976 (143s) 5128 (140s) 5173 (137s)