Re: 20010821: building netCDF on 64-bit machines

>From: Bob Wilhelmson <address@hidden>
>cc: address@hidden,
>Subject: Re: netCDF 64 bit version
>Organization: UIUC
>Keywords: 200108212157.f7LLvp125042 netCDF 64-bit

Hi Bob,

> Who is in charge of netCDF now?  Do you know of any problems
> compiling netCDF for 64 bit machines like the new Itanium?  We are
> proceeding to try and compile and wanted to know if anyone else has
> had any experience

We don't have access to an Itanium platform for testing yet, but we
have successfully built and tested netCDF on several other 64-bit
platforms:

 - IBM AIX SP
 - SGI IRIX64
 - Sun/SPARC 64-bit "v9" architecture

We've also recently built and tested support for netCDF files larger
than 2 Gbytes on a 32-bit Linux Pentium system with Large File Support
(64-bit file offsets).  I'll be writing a netCDF FAQ entry about that
soon, since it describes the constraints on large netCDF files in
detail.  In particular, we created a 6 Gbyte netCDF file on the Linux
system that could be accessed by any other system with Large File
Support, but if accessed by a system without it would just produce
the error message "file too large" on attempting to open the file.

So I don't see any obstacles to building on Itanium, if you use the
right compiler flags.  For the flags used in the above, see

  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/russ/netcdf/INSTALL.html

--Russ