Newsletter News: Quick-Tip Index Now On-Line

In honor of the new century, we've spruced up our web edition. At:

http://www.arsc.edu/support/news/qtindex.xml

you'll find an alphabetical index to all Quick-Tip topics. We'll keep it up-to-date, and hope that it's useful.

By the way, Happy New Year to all!

Performance Analysis of the CRAY T3E-1200E

Many thanks to Ed Anderson, who writes:

I have just completed a technical report, "Performance Analysis of the CRAY T3E-1200E". It is similar in scope to the "Benchmarker's Guide" paper of a couple years ago, but with CRAY T3E-1200 results.

The paper is available on the web at:

http://www.arsc.edu/support/news/T3Enews/misc/perf1200.html

And in postscript at:

ftp://ftp.arsc.edu/pub/mpp/docs/perf1200.ps

A Programmer's Guide to ZPL

Larry Snyder of the University of Washington writes that he has published a text on the ZPL parallel programming language. You may find it at:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262692171

From the synopsis:

ZPL is a new array programming language for science and engineering computation. Designed for fast execution on both sequential and parallel computers, it is intended to replace languages such as Fortran and C.

[...]

["A Programmer's Guide to ZPL"] illustrates typical ZPL usage and explains in an intuitive manner how the constructs work. The emphasis is on teaching the reader to be a ZPL programmer. Scientific computations are used as examples throughout.

A: {{ I've installed the "dracula" software in my account, and it came
   {{ with "man" pages:
   {{
   {{   $ ls -1 ~/pkg/dracula
   {{   bin
   {{   lib
   {{   man
   {{   $ ls -1 ~/pkg/dracula/man
   {{   man1
   {{
   {{ I want "man" to find the system pages AND the dracula pages:
   {{ automatically.  What should I do?



The problem varies from Unix to Unix.  For the Crays, from John
Metzner and Dale Clark, here's a solution:

   export MANPATH=$MANPATH:~/pkg/dracula/man


---------


Here's an alternative from Ed Anderson:

I would recommend creating a user-defined module.  This would be a file
like the following:

#%Module########################################
##
## dracula modulefile
##
#
proc ModulesHelp { } {
puts stderr "Info about the dracula package goes here."
puts stderr "It will be printed by the \"module help dracula\" command."
}
set _module_name  [module-info name]
set is_module_rm  [module-info mode remove]
set sys           [uname sysname]
set os            [uname release]
set mach          [uname machine]

set DRACULA_PATH /home/boris/dracula
####################################
prepend-path    MANPATH      $DRACULA_PATH/man
prepend-path    PATH         $DRACULA_PATH/bin
prepend-path    INCLUDE_PATH_T3E  $DRACULA_PATH/include
prepend-path    LD_LIBRARY_PATH_T3E  $DRACULA_PATH/lib


Put this in your own ~/mymodules directory (or get your systems
administrator to install it in /opt/modulefiles).  Then enter

module use ~/mymodules
module load dracula

and you're ready to go.  I've assumed that modules are already
initialized, which is the case for most users of Cray systems.

If you have many personal module files, you should put the "module use"
command in your .cshrc or .profile file after initializing modules.


---------


Under IRIX, this is more of a challenge, as MANPATH isn't pre-set by
the system.  Here's the solution, from "man man":

  -M path      
  
     the standard manual directories could be augmented with personal
     manual pages by specifying the path:

       /usr/share/catman:/usr/share/man:/usr/catman:/usr/man:$HOME/man


Alternatively, you could set MANPATH--but you must set it to the
complete list of paths, because it overrides the standard search.


---------


From Richard Griswold, here's a Linux solution:

On my Linux system, man has a -w flag that prints the directories man
searches for manpages.  Man initially gets this information from
/etc/man.config.  However if $MANPATH is set, "man -w" is the same as
$MANPATH.  So all you have to do is:

  export MANPATH=`man -w`:${HOME}/pkg/dracula/man

Since ${HOME}/pkg/dracula/man is now appended to "man -w", you can add
other directories in the same way:

  export MANPATH=`man -w`:${HOME}/foo

This way you never have to worry about checking if $MANPATH is set or not
(more important under csh and tcsh than under ksh or bash).

If you want man to revert to its initial state, just issue:

  unset MANPATH

I'm not sure if this flag is available on all versions of man.





Q: "mv -i" and "cp -i" only prompt when the move or copy would
   overwrite an existing file.  "rm -i", on the other hand, prompts
   on EVERY file -- as expected!

   How can I get "mv" and "cp" to ask about every file too, so I 
   can issue wild-card commands like:
   
     mv -i *.F90  ../some/directory
     
   and then only move some of the files? 
 

[ Answers, questions, and tips graciously accepted. ]

---

Current Editors:

Ed Kornkven	ARSC HPC Specialist	ph: 907-450-8669
Kate Hedstrom	ARSC Oceanographic Specialist	ph: 907-450-8678
Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
University of Alaska Fairbanks
PO Box 756020
Fairbanks AK 99775-6020

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