Installing and managing SifDec

The current version of SifDec comes in the form of a gzipped tarfile. To uncompress and extract the SifDec distribution from it, move the file to a new directory of your choice--we shall refer to this directory as $SIFDEC--and issue the commands

prompt% gunzip sifdec.tar.gz
prompt% tar xvf sifdec.tar

or, more compactly,

prompt% gunzip -c sifdec.tar.gz | tar xvf -

On GNU-based LINUX systems, this is also done by the single command

prompt% tar zxvf sifdec.tar.gz

If you want the SifDec files to be accessible to a number of users on a shared filesystem on your local network, you might need privileged access to your machines, or to have these steps performed by your system administrator.

The current installation is via a text-based interface, in which the user is prompted for choices pertaining to the desired installation. The main installation script is install_sifdec and interacts with a number of auxiliary scripts. We examine these scripts in turn, using an example of a SifDec installation on a shared-filesystem network. The scripts provided are:

1. install_sifdec: installs a new instance of SifDec on the system,
2. update_sifdec: updates files in an installed instance of SifDec,
3. uninstall_sifdec: remove a particular instance of SifDec installation.

In addition the the three above scripts, we will also examine a manner to re-generate parts of SifDec, due to the modification of one or more files.

These scripts can be found in

$SIFDEC/build/scripts

Suppose, by way of example, that your local network contains the following machines (amongst others).

1. a SUN Ultra workstation running Solaris with an installed Sun Fortran 90 compiler, f90,
2. an intel-based personal computer running LINUX for which the Gnu Fortran 77 compiler, g77, is installed, and
3. a Compaq Alpha running Tru-64 for which the Compaq Fortran 77 compiler, f77, is available.

In the remainder of this documentation, we describe the role of the aforementioned scripts based on this example of network. Assume that you wish to install an instance of SifDec for each of these machines, according to Table 1.1:

Table 1.1: A possible installation of SifDec on a shared-filesystem network. Size refers to the (maximum) dimension of the examples you wish to run, while Precision denotes the floating-point precision required.

Machine	Compiler	Size	Precision
SUN	f90	large	double
Intel	g77	medium	single
Compaq	f90	large	double

SifDec relies on portable Makefiles, generated from architecture-independent Umakefiles^1.1.