20040520: adding some compiler options to McIDAS

>From: Robert Mullenax <address@hidden>
>Organization: Universal Weather
>Keywords: 200405201932.i4KJWltK000072 McIDAS build

Hi Robert,

>I would like to wring a little more performance out of McIDAS by using
>-xtarget=pentium4
>under Solaris x86 using the Solaris x86 Early Access compilers.
>I believe I should add that in either makefile or mccomp.sh but I am not
>sure where.

You would add this to mccomps.h.  Here is an example:

 ...

        # use the SunOS vendor compilers
        case ${vendor:-$MCIDAS_CC} in
        ?*)
            case `uname -r` in
            5.*)
                cc=cc
                ccopts="-xtarget=pentium4"
                ;;

            4.*)
                cc=acc
                ;;
            esac
            ;;
        esac
        case ${vendor:-$MCIDAS_F77} in
        ?*)
            case `uname -r` in
            5.*)
                fc=f77
                fcopts="-xtarget=pentium4"
                flopts=
                ;;

            4.*)
                fc=f77
                ;;
            esac
            ;;
        esac
 ...


Please let us know if this shows significant performance improvement
on your SolarisX86 machine.

Cheers,

Tom
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>From address@hidden  Thu May 20 14:07:04 2004

Thanks. I'll compile with gcc/g77 as well and let you know the difference.
On GEMPAK, other than nex2gini not working at all (strangely enough the same
kind of problem as I see under RH Linux 9) I have seen 40-70% speed
improvements over the Unidata binary compiled with WS5.2 

>From address@hidden  Sun May 23 09:19:16 2004

At least for my purposes (trying to do a whole lot of things and needing
to do them as quickly as possible) it's a decent improvement, although
not as dramatic of an improvement that I saw with GEMPAK.

Imgremap is one of the most time consuming tasks, so I focused on that.

In doing several different remaps, including remapping a 540MB hires topo
file, the version compiled with the x86 Beta Studio 9 compilers (using -O
-xtarget=pentium4 -xlic_lib=sunperf....Sun now has performance libs for x86)
averages 13-20% faster than using straight gcc/g77.  Remapping that
540MB file went from 42 seconds to 34 seconds.   

I haven't tested everything yet to see if it works..but so far eveything
I normally use in my scripts works fine.