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1. November 1986 This version replaces the Consulting Office Document of the same title The Record Volume 7 Number 12 27 December 1 1986 VMSTA Using the CRAY X MP Interactively by Nancy Dawson Version 1 0 November 1986 This document describes how to use the NCAR produced VMSTA EXEC for interactive access to the X MP from the IBM 4381 IO front end computer To order SCD documentation send electronic mail TO MARYB on the IBM 4381 front end computer or call Mary Buck at 303 497 1201 Allow two weeks for delivery Users at the Mesa Laboratory can obtain SCD documentation from the bookshelves and black filing cabinet in the SCD User Area Room 33 in the first basement Minutes of the SCD Users Group Meeting October 27 1986 Editor s Note Due to the length of this meeting the presentation by Joe Choy has been summar ized and the presentation by Dave Fulker on Unidata has been omitted except for the questions from the audience and the reponses from Dave Fulker However a report on Unidata with diagrams and figures presented by Dave Fulker during the meeting ts available from SCD Please call the SCD Divisional Office at 808 497 1205 if you would like a copy of the Unidata material Chairman Ray Bovet called the meeting to order and asked for corrections or additions to the September meeting minutes On page 24 the sentence Bailey then asked how the committee arrived at 2 5 should read Rick Wolski
2. less Hardware Downtime less Software Downtime less Environmental Downtime less Operations Use less Other Causes Clock Hours Up less Systems Checkout Clock Hours Avail to Users less Idle Time Clock Hours in Use Available Hours Used _ CRAY C1 COMPUTER October FISCAL YTD Day Avg Total Day Avg Clock Hours in the Month less Scheduled PM less Hardware Downtime less Software Downtime less Environmental Downtime less Operations Use less Other Causes Clock Hours Up less Systems Checkout Clock Hours Avail to Users less Idle Time Clock Hours in Use Available Hours Used The Record The Record Issued by the National Center for Atmospheric Research Scientific Computing Division P O Box 3000 Boulder Colorado 80307 PRINTED MATTER Non Profit Organization U S POSTAGE PAID Boulder Colorado Permit No 558 at
3. 06 00 10 00 Tuesday amp Thursday IBM 4381 IO 07 00 08 30 As needed The Record is published monthly by the Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research NCAR is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Reference to a company or product name does not imply approval or recommendation of that company or product to the exclusion of others Robert Nicol Editor Dee Copelan Manager User Services Frieda Garcia and Karen Hack SCDUG Minutes JoAn Knudson Computer Resources Allocated Sylvia Darmour Computer Statistics Ken Hansen Trouble Design Reports The Record Volume 7 Number 12 3 December 1 1986 Table of Contents Features Consulting Office Schedule Ess ase E E ATEA accent set 4 Recent Policy Changes for the CRAY Computers ccccccccecccccceesseeeeeeeeeees a Other NCAR CRAY X MP News roucaunscireniiiro i a a Tee a A Newson NCAR Graphics and GKS siccciiihesnnieeiiacetitn eee 13 CRAY User Group Meeting Report o cccccccccccsccsessecsssescesseseessesevssseesessessetees 18 How the CVMGx Eunctions Work ccicincdedinnsaeeaiatg het die hsm 23 Software News A Change to OPTION Entries in NCARLB and LOCLIB A uu 25 For The Record MassStorage Systemi NewS sirere cotenna i E T 25 SCD Advisory Panel Meeting Schedule cscsiviciiieudaiaediniatiapediiaseelices 26 Documentation Update rereniurnee ia a E A
4. CPR Systems Manager Paul Rotar is shown in front of NCAR s newly installed CRAY X MP 48 supercomputer The remaining CRAY 1 computer appears on the right GAU Charging on the CRAY X MP Begins December 1 During the last three weeks the load on the CRAY CX computes has grown to the extent that neither the job class structure nor COS can handle it efficiently Most users have been submit ting jobs in the Foreground clasess since there is no charging against GAU allocations This situation has significantly reduced the throughput of jobs For example a 99 second job that required limited MSS and DICOMED resources stayed in the job queue for two days To restore throughput SCD will begin charging against GAU allocations for the use of the CRAY CX computer as of December 1 1986 rather than January 1 1987 During December adjustments may be made to the charging algorithm based on the use of the X MP The 5 minute time restriction on the EXPRESS 2 job class that was instituted in the absence of charging will be removed December 1 The Record Volume 7 Number 12 6 December 1 1986 Reduced Charges on the CRAY C1 Machine As of December 1 charges against users allocations for a given job run on the CRAY C1 com puter will be assessed for only 58 of the regular GAU charges for that job The purpose of this is to make the CRAY C1 charges approximate the charges the same job would have incurred if it ran on CRAY CX system
5. Running on the X MP requires changes to jobs running on the CRAY C1 machine Issue the command HELP XMPCHANG from the IBM 4381 to see additional documentation on how to run on the X MP The informa tion contained in that HELP file is also available in the SCD document entitled CRAY Series Changing Your Job to Run on the X MP Note See the Documentation Update column in this issue for instructions on ordering SCD documents Account statement 11 11 86 All jobs on the X MP must have an ACCOUNT statement immediately following the JOB statement There cannot even be a comment statement between them ACCOUNT AC s22z2ryyyyyyyy where zzzz is the user number and yyyyyyyy is the project number This statement is accept able but not required on C1 The accounting information currently being given in the log file of your job is incorrect The Record Volume 7 Number 12 8 December 1 1986 JOL Not on the X MP 11 11 86 NETAQR and NETDISP are not available on the X MP They must be changed to ACQUIRE and DISPOSE statements Please consult the documentation in The CRAY 1 Computers A Guide to Supercomputing at NCAR for the form of each statement COPYSR COPYSF and COPYSD are not supported on the X MP The system form of the COPYR COPYF and COPYD commands now provide the shift option with much more flexi bility than the COPYSx commands gave See the CRAY COS 1 15 reference manual for more information on these copying co
6. The job classes on both CRAY computers will be the same except that there are no mono processing classes on the CRAY C1 computer Field Length Reduction on the CRAY C1 System The throughput on CRAY C1 has been severely impaired by jobs that use maximum memory and over 50 of the available disk space This situation has prompted numerous user com plaints Further complications arose when the normal system utilities to link with the Mass Storage System and the NCAR Local Network had to be dropped out of the CRAY C1 system until these large jobs finished In order to improve throughput on the CRAY C1 machine and to encourage the movement of large jobs to the more expansive resources of the CRAY X MP the maximum allowable field length for any job run on the CRAY C1 system has been reduced from 791 000 to 650 000 as of November 11 Jobs that exceed the maximum allowable field length on the CRAY C1 computer will be dropped If you have problems converting your jobs to run on the X MP call the Consulting Office at 303 497 1278 Other NCAR CRAY X MP News To help our users run their first jobs on the CRAY CX system SCD held an introductory meet ing on November 10 in the Main Seminar Room of the Mesa Laboratory to discuss the machine status and other items of interest SCD also held a series of seminars on X MP topics during October and November to familiarize users with the new software and hardware CRAY CX First line Consultants To make
7. design philosophy CFT divides program units into smaller units called blocks and then attempts to optimize the instructions within each block These blocks have a default size which may be changed by the user with the MAXBLOCK keyword on the CFT JCL statement A user may also specify the location of a block boundary with the BLOCK compiler directive Aside from user determination of the size and location of blocks the division of a program unit into blocks by CFT is completely arbitrary Scalar optimization occurs solely within each block and information generated in one block that might be useful for optimizing a later code segment is not shared across blocks Consequently full scalar optimization on a program unit level is hard to achieve with CFT CFT77 solves this problem by performing global scalar optimization CFT77 generated code may run 10 30 faster than CFT generated code depending on how much scalar work is performed The analysis required to do global optimization is much more costly than the piecewise optimi zation done by CFT Field reports have indicated that compile times under CFT77 can be 10 15 times greater than under CFT CRAY Research has a goal to reduce this to a factor of 2 4 There is also a feature that allows the user to disable the global optimization feature which results in compile times comparable to CFT Its modular structure should provide for simple upgrades of any portion of the compiler without affecting
8. on an interim basis while they continue to plan and develop other connections to the NLN and the Ethernet to allow all users to directly access the CRAY computers SCD would like to get some input from users because they don t currently have resources to apply to this type of pro ject SCD wants feedback in terms of a timeframe and other restrictions that are preventing divisions from just maintaining their current gateways until SCD is able to procure the appropriate resources in terms of both funds and personnel One possible gateway SCD is con sidering is the IBM 4381 IO system NCAR wide electronic mail is not possible in the current system It does support FTP but requires that passwords be known in order to send and receive It does not support TFTP in both directions TELENET works in line mode It works in full screen mode for VT100 termi nals SCD has very limited resources and has not been able to assign anyone to work on RJE support on the IBM 4381 IO system over Ethernet Part of that will depend on the priorities and suggestions from the users how quickly they need this and what things they can set aside in order to work on this possible gateway Another complication is that the Data Defense Net work DDN ARPANET and NSFnet are developing an RJE protocol to run over TCP IP There is no exact time table They want to work closely with SCD so that the protocol is sup ported It will be a standard protocol by which anyone throughou
9. re not so interested in lower atmosphere research Dave said that the single most important contribution is at the infrastructure level but Unidata follows the notion that users should have their own computing resources The relationship between those local computing resources and the specialized resources which Dave likes to think of as services on the network needs to evolve and work That concept is completely independent of the particular discipline or even the particular applications The concept was for Unidata to help make the mode of operation to be more the standard mode and to get the kind of support it needs to be fully functional Dave believes that forms of interactive graphics are going to play key roles in this effort Graphics products should probably be able to handle raster images as well as more vector oriented images One may also need to control various attributes of the graph in an interac tive way in order to highlight certain aspects as well as having the capability to redraw graphics on the workstation The relationship between the graphics package on the worksta tion and graphics support in the supercomputer needs active exploration He believes SCD is The Record Volume 7 Number 12 36 December 1 1986 looking into some possible external support for that effort Unidata may help stimulate that and perhaps that will eventually be a productive area for scientific involvement in the pro gram Those developments in t
10. said her concern is that if they encounter real trouble they may bring the machine to its knees and they won t receive any help because SCD is trying to concentrate on a few users to make sure that things stabilize Greg thought HAO s test users were submitting from IO and wondered if they would like to submit from the VAX as a test Margaret suggested that such tests be coor dinated with the SCD Systems people because that kind of activity is very helpful Margaret Drake also mentioned that she had met with Rick Anthes NCAR Director and Bob MacQueen NCAR Assistant Director who are now beginning to analyze the Strategic Plan ning Committee s recommendations and determine what NCAR s response will be There are two major areas that they want to immediately address First they want Margaret to devise an explicit plan for local area networking at NCAR and suggested that the SCD Users Group could be very helpful in that The second topic is distributed computing at NCAR Margaret stated that it appears NCAR management certainly wants to develop relationships with Uni data They want to know how to help Unidata and exactly what the NCAR divisions would like to do with Unidata She has heard from other division directors Ed Zipser for example who sees his own planning needs to be in one direction while AAP s go in another direction Zipser feels they could be sharing facilities between divisions to get maximum advantage out of them Rick An
11. said he s getting a response right now Ray s impression is that SCD will be happy to provide this if money is available Joe said if appropriate input from all the divisions suggest it is a high enough priority and SCD can get the resources and appropriate personnel yes Chuck D Ambra added that he also will support an SCD decision to purchase another Sun 3 with a similar configuration to what is being purchased for USAN NSFnet as it would minimize a lot of duplication effort He won dered if that will give NCAR the capability if one of these machines were down to use the other one to service both inside and outside traffic Joe said that it probably will Ray Bovet said that when Chuck s memo was written there was some question about the NCAR sites that were running VMS and hence were talking DECnet rather than TCP IP Since that time SUN has announced support for DECnet on their machines so that a machine serving as a gateway for the UNIX machines could with adequate software be similar in func tion to VMS Joe said there are other complications as the network is configured each of the individual divisions go through a bridge box Between NCAR s internal networks and the external networks there is an IP router box that will not allow passthrough of DECnet proto cols at this time Therefore the configuration for the AAP machines is to sit over on the USAN network to allow them to access their history Joe said that the gateway m
12. the CRAY 1 after that the CRAY 1 may be retired Carl said that part of the problem is that the data looks like the old CDC 7600 PLIB tapes CSD had some dedicated volumes and the data were just moved bit by bit CSD was never given the option of asking SCD to convert data on the fly Bernie said they couldn t have converted it on the fly but they did have the option to move it themselves Carl asked if the TBM converter would work on the CRAY X MP Gene Schumacher SCD said yes Carl added that these are essentially archived data sets and CSD plans to convert them as users access them Bernie said SCD is trying to get all data in a standard format Paul Bailey ACD said that Tektronix has announced a new line of terminals and improved some of their hardcopy devices They will be at NCAR on November 10 to demonstrate some of their new products like their high end color copy device The demonstration will be in the Directors Conference Room from 1 5 p m because this room has a PACX connection so users should be able to log onto their own computers and display their own plots rather than look at something that an artist put together Ray Bovet stressed that this is not a plug for Tek tronix If anyone wishes to announce demos of other vendors they are free to do so Ethernet Gateways to NCAR Network Joe Choy Joe explained that the NCAR Local Network NLN basically supports the supercomputers the CRAY machines the Mass Storage System
13. the function CVMGT L 0 2 0 TRUE does not return the value 1 0 it returns a bit pattern which if used in a floating point operation acts just like a 1 0 However if it s used as an integer it s a huge one and if used like a character string it s mosty cuenta What does all of this mean The tricky parts come when the CVMGx functions are used Given a statement like X CVMGT the function is evaluated the BOOLEAN result is interpreted as a real number for the store into X No explicit type conversion is performed regardless of the types of the operands to CVMGT Similarly in an expession like X CVMGT A B LOGIC1 CVMGT C D LOGIC2 the two functions are evaluated and produce BOOLEAN results Boolean operands are com bined using INTEGER arithmetic Thus in this example an integer add is performed produc ing a Boolean result which is then stored into X without any explicit type conversion Imple mentations prior to 1 15 actually were inconsistent and sometimes treated the sum as integer and then did an explicit float before the store Now a low level warning message is issued whenever two Boolean operands are combined in an expression and the result is possibly different from the previous versions If you think Boolean operands should be added using floating point addition think about 1Rx 1b If you think we should use the obvious method think about X 10000000000000000b There are five simple
14. the greatest gains were made when smaller amounts of data were transferred These tests demonstrated the greater efficiency of UNICOS over COS in setting up data transfers between central memory and the SSD Because of the circumstances of these tests their relevance to the batch computing environ ment at NCAR is unclear However the fact that UNICOS provides for direct access files on the SSD and introduces much lower system overhead for SSD data transfers gives it a distinct edge over COS Program Migration to the UNICOS Environment Migration of application programs from COS to UNICOS requires modification of both the Job Control Language JCL segment and the FORTRAN source code segment In general COS JCL statements must be replaced by UNICOS commands This applies to FORTRAN callable JCL as well One exception is the UPDATE utility which will be fully supported in UNICOS CRAY Research has also written a migration tool called PLCOPY which will copy a program library created under COS into a program library that can be used by the UNICOS version of UPDATE CRAY Research plans several other migration tools to facilitate the transition from COS to UNICOS One such tool still under development will help to translate a block of COS JCL statements into a block of UNICOS commands This tool is intended to be a migration aid only and will be supported by CRAY Research for only a limited period of time Another migration tool planned by CR
15. the transition to the X MP easier SCD has requested experienced users to act as local consultants for staff members at their site or within their division The following people have volunteered to answer user questions about the CRAY X MP Remote Sites Pete Guetter U of Wisconsin 608 262 0554 Roberta Young MIT 617 253 0875 Joe Spahr UCLA 213 825 1555 Memorie Yasuda USO 213 743 6008 Clare Larkin Penn State 814 863 3932 The Record Volume 7 Number 12 7 December 1 1986 NCAR Sites Rick Wolski AAP 303 497 1330 Rolanda Garcia ACD 303 497 1446 Chuck D Ambra ASP 303 497 1640 Celia Chen ATD 303 497 1648 Bill Hall CSD RL 6 303 497 8926 John Del Corral DIR ADMP East Park 303 441 2911 Jack Miller HAO 303 497 1513 The Consulting Office is looking for volunteers from other sites If you are interested call 303 497 1278 CRAY X MP News File Since so many things are happening with the CRAY CX machine User Services staff have ini tiated a news file on the IBM 4381 IO system to keep users up to date This file can be accessed by typing NEWS XMP on the IBM 4381 IO computer The following list is a summary of those news items that may be of continuing interest to you They are organized by functional category However for the latest information on the CRAY CX computer you should check the NEWS XMP file on a regular basis before running your jobs on the new machine Required changes 11 10 86
16. to be centrally accessible by local NCAR users or through remote logins She recommends that the IBM 4381 be seen as a gateway and be on Ethernet and doesn t want to see its status on the network downplayed Summary of the UNIDATA Project Presentation Dave Fulker Dave Fulker UCAR gave a history of Unidata summarized the system wiring diagram and concluded with current experiences using the network file system He augmented his talk with some overhead diagrams These diagrams and other information on Unidata are available from SCD see the note at the beginning of these minutes Fulker Presentation Question and Answer Period Paul Bailey ACD asked Fulker if there are any mistakes to avoid as people get together in groups to discuss a response to the request by Rick Anthes in order to ensure compatibility with Unidata Dave said he doesn t think he has anything to add everything said today seems entirely compatible with the directions that they have set Rick Anthes has himself indicated a willingness to work with Unidata to try to ensure compatibility The front end systems men tioned certainly fit into the plan Ray Bovet HAO asked how far away NFS is for the CRAY X MP and if it depends on UNICOS Joe Choy said definitely because it runs on top of the TCP IP Ray said he hears that CRAY is working on something Joe Choy replied that TCP IP is basically operational on UNICOS right now Dave said it s encouraging that Sun has
17. 1 ZTEST TEST DABS E L l 390 CONTINUE 400 CONTINUE 5 The following loop structure generates bad code The complicated IF structure and the call to a function CONXCH in the code are both required for the failure The variable ITT3 is never put into storage but when control is returned following the call to CONXCH the compiler does a fetch for ITTS DO 310 JP2 JPMX NLO l IT IPL JP2 3 l l ITT3 IT 3 use ITT3 as an index to an array IF complicated conditional check GO TO 300 use ITT3 as an index to an array IF another complicated conditional check GO TO 300 use ITT3 as an index to an array 300 IF CONXCH EQ 0 GO TO 310 Use ITT3 as an index to an array 310 CONTINUE Graphics 11 11 86 There are known problems with CONREC The contours may be scrunched together The line containing the contour label information that normally appears under the plot can be placed in other locations on the frame All of these problems will be solved as soon as possible If you are using the VMSTA software the form of the DISPOSE varies from that used to go to the DICOMED or back to your IBM reader from CXJOB There is a discussion of this in the VMSTATION section below The DICOMED is being overwelmed with data as a result of the large number of jobs running on the X MP and the fact that I O resources have not increased proportionally At this time _ November 11 the Job Queue Manager is h
18. AN 26 SCD Users Group Meeting Minutes esssesssssssssssssessessorsssnsssssssssssssresssssseseerese 21 S mmary of Daily Bulletin tems scuchagvceunt cca aceseakitasnteies ets 36 Computer Resource AlGCations secescattanchiiudeaid E E EE 38 Summary of NCAR Computer Use cccccccsscccceessesseteneanececessssensssrsnenteses m 39 Cover Graphic The graphic on the cover of this issue was produced by the staff of The Record by superimpos ing the NCAR GKS Graphics Package demonstration plot for CURVE on itself to create a star Season s greetings and best wishes from SCD Software Change Articles All articles about changes to software that affect the computing environment are now flagged with the triple Delta insignia as shown in the example below ANA Example of a Software Change Article Title by An Author These articles are also marked with a Delta sign in the Table of Contents above Please check these flagged articles carefully for changes that affect your computing procedures The Record Volume 7 Number 12 4 December 1 1986 Consulting Office Schedule for December 1986 Consulting Office hours are 08 30 11 30 and 13 00 16 00 daily Monday through Friday The Consulting Office is closed every Wednesday from 13 00 14 00 for staff meetings Consultants may be reached by calling 303 497 1278 Messages may also be sent to the CONSULTI vir tual machine on the IBM 4381 computer Important Note In conjunctio
19. AY Research will ease the transition from LDR under COS to SEGLDR under UNICOS LDR is the JCL statement used to load link and run com piled programs SEGLDR already available in COS has a similar functionality and will be the only loader available under UNICOS CRAY Research s own experience in code migration The Record Volume 7 Number 12 21 December 1 1986 has shown that applications that make extensive use of the LDR overlay feature are difficult to migrate Consequently they are developing a utility called LD2 which will read an input file of LDR directives translate them to SEGLDR directives and execute a SEGLDR command with the eranelated set of directives CRAY Research plans to include other non UNIX COS commands in UNICOS such as PREMULT a preprocessor necessary for microtasking and FTREF a utility for analyzing module and common block dependencies in a FORTRAN program The program debugging aids DEBUG SYMDEBUG DRD Dynamic Runtime Debugger similar in functionality to SID and DDA will also be included in UNICOS as well as COS The COS JCL statements ACCESS ACQUIRE and SAVE will not have UNICOS counter parts The distinction between permanent and local datasets is not made in UNICOS Files that are to be used in an application program running under UNICOS should be created using a FORTRAN OPEN statement Such files should also be CLOSEd prior to program ter mination However certain important featu
20. B statement MFL is set to the decimal number of words of memory required by the job At NCAR MFL may not be specified without a value because the default value is 8 million words The Record Volume 7 Number 12 9 December 1 1986 Important Note If you use more than 4 million words of memory you must change from LDR to SEGLDR Various FORTRAN errors and considerations 11 10 86 CRAY is tightening the enforcement of the FORTRAN 77 standard with each release of CFT he following items list problems encountered by the initial group of users on the X MP It will be expanded as necessary during the friendly user period Some of these are SPRs against the compiler many are caused by non standard usage of FORTRAN statements If you wish to access the 1 14 version of the compiler from the X MP add the following ACCESS statement in front of your first CFT statement ACCESS DN CFT ID V114BF5P If you do this to circumvent a problem and you are successful please report the problem to the Consulting Office so that we may pursue a solution using CFT 1 15 Double precision 11 10 86 You cannot fill a double precision word with a Hollerith string You cannot set a double precision variable using A 0D you must use the form A 0 D0 DO loops 11 11 86 1 In executing the loop structure shown on the left one would expect to see equivalent behavior to that shown by the loop on the right In at lease one instance the com
21. BM SCD staff will arrange to send electronic mail on the IBM 4381 IO system to each user associated with a current valid user number If you have a login on the IBM 4381 IO sys tem please log on to that system over the next few weeks and check for mail messages regard ing these MSS files SCD staff will also be contacting users personally to remind them about these files The Record Volume 7 Number 12 26 December 1 1986 If you receive notification that you are listed as the owner of one of these files please check the files in question SCD recommends that you immediately move any files you wish to keep to another MSS directory If you have files that you no longer need you can delete them yourself or ask SCD to delete them for you by sending a list via electronic mail TO MARC on the IBM 4381 IO system If you are incorrectly listed as the owner of someone else s files or if you have questions about this process please contact Marc Nelson at 303 497 1262 as soon as possible Files that have not been moved by the end of January will be purged MSS Charging Begins December 1 As of December 1 charges against GAU allocations will be made for use of the MSS For more information on job classes and charging see the SCD document entitled CRAY Series CRAY X MP and Data related Charges or the article on charging in the November 1986 issue of The Record SCD Advisory Panel Meeting Schedule With the advent of the CRAY
22. COS Performance CRAY Research presented the results of several performance tests that compare COS 1 16 and a pre release version of UNICOS 2 0 CRAY ran these tests on a two processor X MP with 16 million words of main memory a 32 million word SSD and 2 DD 49 disk drives All of the tests were performed on a dedicated machine the benchmark programs were the only jobs run ning on the machine during the tests Two CPU intensive application programs which CRAY Research acquired from CRAY users for the specific purpose of obtaining benchmarks showed roughly the same performance under both operating systems Likewise two I O intensive jobs using FORTRAN READ statements from datasets on the DD 49 disks performed similarly under the two environments The I O performance result must be further qualified by noting that the datasets being read were con tiguous on the disks in other words they were not fragmented over several disk sectors as is often the case with data on NCAR s DD 19 disk drives that are connected to the CRAY 1 sys tem The Record Volume 7 Number 12 20 December 1 1986 The analysis included system call time comparisons In one test the process ID of a job was obtained by making a call to the system in the other the amount of time required to switch processes interrupt a running process disconnect it from a physical CPU and connect another process to a physical CPU was measured In both tests UNICOS showed a gain o
23. IF 7 lt ae a pr Dok a Volume 7 Number 12 A Newsletter of the Scientific are harden JV December 1 RX gt 1986 National Center for Atmospheric Res Inside Urgent MSS Purge Notice Important Updates on the X MP News on NCAR Graphics and GKS 1986 CRAY User Group Meeting Report Change to OPTION Entries in SNCARLB and LOCLIB Volume 7 Number 12 2 December 1 1986 SERVICES DIRECTORY Direct dial prefix 303 497 NCAR Operator 303 497 1000 Consulting Office 303 497 1278 NEW USER INFORMATION extension Computing Resource Applications Cicely Ridley 1211 E John Adams 1213 Project amp User Number Assignment Rosemary Mitchell 1235 Document amp Manual Distribution Mary Buck 1201 REMOTE USER INFORMATION Data Communications RJE Bill Ragin 1258 US Telecom TELENET Marla Sparn 1301 RJE Password Assignment Rosemary Mitchell 1235 Visitor Information m Belinda Housewright 1310 OPERATIONAL INFORMATION Computer Operations Bob Niffenegger 1240 Machine Room l Oper Supervisor 1200 Graphics Operations Andy Robertson 1241 1242 Tape Librarian inch and MSS Sue Long 1245 Software Distribution Mary Buck 1201 Output Mailing Mary Buck 1201 SCHEDULE OF MACHINE UNAVAILABILITY All machines may be down from 07 00 until 08 30 daily for Systems Checkout In addition some machines will be down for Preventive Maintenance as follows CRAY C1 06 00 08 00 Monday amp Wednesday CRAY CX
24. X MP acceptance period A consultant will be available to answer your X MP questions in Room 17C of the Mesa Lab The hours are 09 30 11 30 and 13 00 15 00 Regular consulting will continue to be available by phone at 303 497 1278 or by appointment The Record Volume 7 Number 12 38 December 1 1986 Computer Resources Allocated in October 1986 SCIENTIST Mary Cairns McCoy Colorado State University John E Walsh University of Illinois Peter S Ray Florida State University James R Holton University of Wisconsin Eugene S Takle lowa State University Ken Ichi Nishikawa Paul B Dusenbery University of Iowa University of Colorado Janet G Luhmann UCLA PROJECT TITLE Numerical modeling of mesoscale severe weather circulations CFM snow cover sensitivity tests Modeling of mountain thunderstorms Stratospheric general circulation modeling Finite element boundary layer model Wave particle interactions in the plasma sheet a simulation study Lower thermosphere dynamics at high latitudes Note A request may be supported at a lower level than requested because a It exceeds the five hour limit above which Panel review is required or b Reviewers consider the amount of time requested to be excessive The Record Volume 7 Number 12 39 December 1 1986 Summary of NCAR Computer Use for October 1986 CRAY CA COMPUTER FISCAL YTD Clock Hours in the Month less Scheduled PM
25. X MP the computing power available to SCD users has been enhanced by a factor of at least five Large resource requests for this new machine will be con sidered at the next meeting of the SCD Advisory Panel so now is the time to think about those big projects that have been waiting on the back burner because of lack of computing resources Requests for a total of more than five hours of central processor time on the CRAY 1A or the CRAY X MP computers must be considered by the SCD Advisory Panel which will meet April 6 7 1987 University users must submit large requests to John Adams or Cicely Ridley of the Scientific Computing Division by January 23 1987 Nine to ten weeks are needed for the prel iminary review of requests and for the preparation printing and distribution of Panel materi als Documentation Update SCD Documentation GETSRC GETDOC and AQPLMS on the NCAR CRAY Computers Locally Developed Commands for Public Libraries by Dick Valent September 1986 This document replaces the GETSRC and GETDOC section of The CRAY 1 Computers A Guide to Supercomputing at NCAR It also describes a new command AQPLMS which is used to ACQUIRE UPDATE pro gram libraries for the CRAY applications libraries maintained at NCAR CRAY X MP and Data related Charges by Pete Peterson Version 1 1 revised November 1986 This version replaces Version 1 0 SEGLDR The CRAY X MP Segment Loader by Brett Wayne Version 1 1 revised
26. a strong program of working on front end support with CRAY and is sure that Sun has that network file system model in mind Joe Choy said there is other work being done by other universities to provide NFS on other machines Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute is working on NFS on the CMS machine but it is more of a university graduate project Ray said many files at NCAR are stored on the Mass Storage System which is not running CMS Joe said it runs MVS Ray asked if someone is working on NFS for MVS machines Joe said not that he is aware Dave Fulker said the principal sources for IBM software that he knows about that are at all network oriented are Spartacus the suppliers of the software package that is being brought up on the system and the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Dept which has been working on IBM networking Ray said there are a certain number of data sets that are on CRAY disks The bulk of everything here is done with the MSS Dave said one might want to think of the MSS as a file server to both the CRAY and to the outside world Joe Choy said there is much more work involved than just the MSS There has to be access to a sub machine extra pro cessing power and other resources to support the NFS site Ray Bovet added that data format conversion on the fly is also needed 7 The Record Volume 7 Number 12 8 5 December 1 1986 Dave Fulker said that some of these things are in fact practical within a reasonabl
27. achine will be between NCAR s local Ethernet and the NLN Ray felt that buying TCP IP software for the VMS machines makes sense Ray Bovet asked what can be done to have the SCD Users Group give input to Rick Anthes on local networking at NCAR Margaret Drake said that Rick Anthes is asking for a long term strategy for how to manage and who is to manage the local area network at NCAR He would like immediate involvement of the divisions in the planning of this and would like to use this users group to get input Ray asked if a committee should be formed Paul Bailey ACD said there already has been two meetings of a group of interested people which is a fairly large sub set of the SCD Users Group Paul added that there is no problem in augmenting the group It is a matter of finding out what the needs are the time frame and setting up a schedule to work on it Margaret said that the Group certainly would be ample for the technical part of this problem The other part is user recommendation for management Paul said it must be defined first Ray suggested that he and Margaret meet with Rick Anthes and Bob MacQueen Joe Choy added that the committee Paul refers to was formed out of a need and didn t report to anyone it was informal Margaret said that it may change after a meeting with Rick Anthes Bob Nicol SCD pointed out that not having an interactive central machine that everyone can access causes SCD serious problems as well SCD would lik
28. and plot options with the latter If you inadvertantly use the wrong entry it will cause incorrect printout or plots and may result in a flood of USER GP002 error messages in your CRAY LOG file This naming conflict has become a problem due to changes in COS Version 1 15 The default library search order in COS 1 15 no longer looks for routines in NCARLB before checking SYSLIB A temporary fix is easily implemented see below but for the longer term we recommend changing calls to the NSPP OPTION routine Scope LOCLIB is the only SCD supported source library at NCAR that uses the NSPP OPTION call NCARLB is the only SCD supported relocatable library that uses the NSPP OPTION call Within LOCLIB the NSPP OPTION entry is located in package PLOTS88 and packages that contain NSPP OPTION calls are The Record Volume 7 Number 12 25 December 1 1986 CONRECSMTH CTRINT PREPA CONRECSUPR FDPACN PWRX CONREC FDPACR THREED Solution User Services has replaced the NSPP OPTION calls in the LOCLIB and NCARLB libraries with OPTN calls on both CRAY computers The NSPP OPTION has been changed in PLOTS88 to issue a message in the CRAY job log file warning that the NSPP OPTION entry will be removed on December 17 Important Note This change will be made on both of the CRAY computers Users can avoid problems in the immediate future by specifying LIB NCARLB on LDR and SEGLDR control statements in CRAY jobs using the NSPP OPTION routin
29. ape will be provided a free copy of the Release 2 tape when it becomes available that free copy will include all documentation updates Release 2 Software Development During the next several months staff will be preparing the Release 2 package which will con tain the following additions and improvements e An Implementor s Guide This guide will give a step by step procedure for installation of the package on a gen eric system The Record Volume 7 Number 12 14 December 1 1986 An updated translator reference document This document will explain what the CGM translator is what it does and how it does it The document will also explain how GRAPHCAPs and FONTCAPs are generated for generic plotting devices An updated version of the translator Software fixes for all trouble reports received to date Examples of the required set of machine dependent primitives for VMS CMS UNIX and COS based machines Current plans call for distribution of Release 2 of the generic version of the package begin ning in Spring 1987 DEC VAX VMS NCAR GKS Graphics Package Staff members of NCAR s Atmospheric and Analysis Prediction Division AAP have produced an implementation package of the NCAR GKS graphics software for Digital Equipment Corp DEC VAX computers running the VMS operating system Although SCD has suspended dis tribution of the generic NCAR GKS Graphics Package a Release 1 version specificall
30. are fully accepted and implemented by UCAR and NCAR then SCD and NCAR must plan to pro vide gateway services as mentioned earlier in order to provide these connections to get to the supercomputing facilities There is such a gateway being planned but it is being funded through USAN and is specifically designated for USAN NSFnet It has been funded by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing and has been designated for remote users to access submit jobs to and get output back from the CRAY computers The users will work remotely on their work stations or local front end machine and with the standard set of ARPANET protocols submit their jobs to the NCAR network and get their output back Ideally SCD would like the gateways to be completely transparent and be efficient and effective SCD s direction is to provide the transparency using standard products and standard hardware and interfaces In order to do that and to be able to run standard protocol all the way to the CRAY or other machines the ARPANET protocols must be supported ARPANET is avail able and continues to be enhanced on the UNICOS systems There are currently several gateways that exist between Ethernet and the HYPERchannel net work Specifically HAO has a VAX running UNIX SCD has a Pyramid running UNIX and AAP has a VAX running VMS that supports DECnet users Those users are able to submit jobs through AAP1 SCD strongly recommends that these gateways continue to be supported
31. ckages The final and perhaps most important reason is to supply the foundation for future upgrades to the func tionality of the utilities in a coherent and standard conforming manner Why Upgrade the NCAR Utilities At the June 1986 SCD User Conference interested users strongly recommended that SCD enhance the NCAR utilities This view was also expressed by the SCD Strategic Planning Committee Specific enhancements cited on pages 22 and 23 of that report include A consistent integrated flexible contouring package that would include facilities for color and area fill e A portable facility for the display of raster image data e Facilities for building interactive graphics applications for data analysis The Record Volume 7 Number 12 17 December 1 1986 A consistent set of utilities for displaying 3 dimensional objects Portable software for solid image synthesis Animation utilities Distributed graphics systems The recommendations specified that SCD develop these capabilities for the NCAR software rather than acquiring them from commercial vendors based upon the following factors The NCAR Graphics Package is portable This means that a scientist can run the same graphics on NCAR s equipment and on cen tral or departmental computers at one or more universities The NCAR software is discipline oriented The utilities at NCAR grew out of an environment in which a major pool of application programmers were di
32. d like to add any comments Gene stated that Systems did discover that on the CRAY X MP the special I O channels to allow talking to the Network Systems HYPERchannel box are not identical to the boxes on the CRAY 1A SCD is now working on adjusting the code for the differences The network remains stable for six hours and then will suffer a serious hangup When it functions it appears to transfer data just fine The Record Volume 7 Number 12 28 December 1 1986 Margaret then asked if Gene Schumacher would address another uncertainty concerning the FORTRAN compiler being used Gene said it is Version 1 15 on the CRAY X MP Margaret said that Paul Rotar had implied that it is not translating all code precisely as it does on the CRAY 1A She felt SCD should check on that before opening the CRAY X MP up to the gen eral users Greg Woods HAO asked whether users would be able to submit jobs in the normal way once the CRAY X MP was made available to the public on November 2 Margaret replied yes if things go well Greg asked if the policy until then is for users to send at their own risk or would SCD prefer that they didn t send at all Margaret replied that it would be at their own risk they have selected 8 or 10 users who are helping to debug the system Greg won dered if she wanted him to lock users out because the CRAY X MP is logged on to HAO s VAX and there is nothing to stop users from using it unless he specifically turns it off Margaret
33. e Users should fol low this action by replacing NSSP OPTION calls with OPTN calls using the following code as a guideline SUBROUTINE OPTION ICAS INT ITAL IOR CALL OPTN CASE ICAS IF INT EQ 0 CALL OPTN INTN LOW IF INT EQ 1 CALL OPTN INTN HIGH CALL OPTN FONT ITAL CALL OPTN OREN IOR RETURN END Richard Valent is a CRAY software librarian in the User Services Section of SCD Mass Storage System News Important Notice There are approximately 14 000 data files on the Mass Storage System MSS that have not been accessed in any way by any user since SCD staff transferred them from the old TBM sys tem to the MSS All of these files are stored on the MSS with the pathname MSS TBM TBMusnname the TBM dataset name They are stored on IBM 4380 magnetic cartridges and currently occupy the equivalent of 1 000 such cartridges This cartridge space is needed for other data so SCD is prompting the owners to move any files they wish to keep to their own directories so that unneeded files can be purged THESE FILES HAVE PASSED THEIR SCHEDULED PURGE DATE SCD will delay purging these files until the end of January Meanwhile SCD is making every attempt to contact the owners of all 14 000 files to urge them to move files they want to keep to the appropriate directory to avoid the purge Most of these 14 000 files have an associated user number reflecting the file ownership on the T
34. e IBM 4381 and its CMS environment There is more throughput capacity on this network than on the TELENET on TELENET most users are res tricted to 1200 baud or 2400 baud SCD is talking about a much higher bandwidth connection with full screen support Ray surmised that it s SCD s job to coordinate the demands of out side and inside users but there is certainly a demand from the inside users to have a con venient way to access the NCAR machines Joe said part of the reason why the ARPANET The Record Volume 7 Number 12 33 December 1 1986 gateway that was selected for the USAN project has a lot of disks on it is because there are two protocols and it is a store and forward machine Adequate space must be provided to do that because of the size of some of the jobs It will be performing many tasks that will also support a connection to the ARPANET at 56 kilobits per second so that is why it has several output memory paths in order to minimize the amount of paging that is done Ray stated for the record that he will support an SCD decision to spend 80 000 on another Sun Joe said that it is not another 80 000 The current Sun is funded totally by OASC and was designated for that purpose by OASC Ray Bovet said Chuck D Ambra ASP was involved in writing a memo as a result of a meeting with some NCAR in house sites requesting a gateway machine of this sort That memo was sent to SCD and Ray wondered if he has gotten a response Chuck
35. e correctly under CFT will also do so under CFT77 Version 1 3 of CFT77 will run on a CRAY 1 and is scheduled for release later this year CFT77 conforms to FORTRAN 77 conventions and includes some FORTRAN 8x extensions such as array processing as well as CRAY Research standard extensions like NAMELIST CFT77 provides the same automatic vectorization features as CFT Early field reports indi cate however that there are loops that CFT 1 15 vectorizes but CFT77 does not CRAY Research wants to know about such loops and wants CFT77 to vectorize everything vectorized by CFT There are also some loops that vectorize under CFT77 but not under CFT CFT77 supports multitasking on the X MP at both the macrotasking and microtasking level just as CFT does There are plans for eliminating the need to use the PREMULT preprocessor for microtasking with CFT77 and CRAY Research also promised an autotasking feature in CFT77 sometime before mid 1987 Autotasking involves automatic dependency analysis and partitioning of scalar loops without user intervention This is analagous to automatic vectori zation and should be contrasted with microtasking which provides a similar facility through the use of compiler directives and the PREMULT preprocessor Microtasking requires the user to analyze data dependencies Autotasking is not planned for future releases of CFT The major differences between the CFT and CFT77 compilers lie in scalar optimization and
36. e time frame and NFS support on a front end machine might be very useful Good support under VMS for the network file system will probably be available through one source or another within the year There is already good support for the IBM PCs available Joe Choy said the SCD Pyramid will be up on NFS in about two months Ray thinks it is highly desirable to be able to just access files Dave said the real question is at what point does it make sense to move whole files or to access pieces of them If one is access ing pieces what is the actual paging mechanism does one bring a page out and do a subset selection on that page before sending it across the network or does one do all the selection on the other side Considering the differences in speeds and data set sizes used on the CRAY and workstations Dave doesn t think anyone has enough experience to really know how to do it The question is harder for outside users than for local users because there will always be sub stantial probably an order of magnitude differences in speed between the local connections and the long distance ones Carl Mohr CSD asked what the individual divisions at NCAR can do to support Unidata He asked if Unidata should take a leadership role or if there are things that can be done to expedite it Dave Fulker said he has to answer the question in two ways First SCD is han dling some of the networking development that is being funded outside of the atmospheric
37. e to be able to disseminate informa tion to everyone from one central location The documentation staff has been evaluating on line documentation usability over the past few years to come up with some kind of plan that will work Bob stated that there seems to be a need for a central interactive machine that The Record Volume 7 Number 12 34 December 1 1986 everyone can access not only NCAR local people but also remote users Ray Bovet said he s not sure a central interactive machine is needed He sees SCD s role as not so much providing the central interactive machine as the networking so that everyone can communicate In the past SCD could assume that users would come in on the IO machine and that was the place where everything resided NCAR doesn t need just a replacement of the IO machine now it needs to communicate with whatever machines the universities have There probably does need to be a central place for getting the documentation Carl Mohr said it s just one more node on the network Paul Bailey asked which network Ray said it has to be the TCP IP Ethernet type networks because that s clearly the direction of the future That is why TCP IP is needed on the IBM 4381 system Margaret said SCD may not need the front end services that it currently provides but it may need others Carol Fey Chatfield ADM added that the library is currently developing a system for on line querying of the library s catalog which needs
38. eation of a new graphical utility by any of the consortium members will automatically be compatible with the NCAR environment Moreover any addition to the SLATEC library will be available to NCAR UCAR sites at a fraction of the cost of commercial graphical software 2 SCD is pursuing a possible collaboration with UCAR and private industry for graphical development as part of the new UCAR Corporate Affiliates Program The Record Volume 7 Number 12 18 December 1 1986 3 SCD is requesting bids for major commercial packages such as DI 3000 and DISSPLA NCAR and UCAR management will be presented with a list of options and associated costs We welcome any suggestions that you may have regarding commercial packages for evaluation please send them to Scientific Computing Division National Center for Atmospheric Research P O Box 3000 Attn Bob Lackman GKS Software Boulder CO 80307 3000 or send electronic mail to rll scdswl arpa or TO RLL on the IBM 4381 IO system The actual selection of software will depend upon a number of factors including approval at various levels however we would greatly appreciate any aid that you can provide in com piling the preliminary list Bob Lackman leads the Software Product Development Group in the User Services Section of SCD Cray User Group Meeting Report by Michael Pernice The Cray User Group CUG held its fall meeting this year at Garmisch Partenkirchen West Germany from Septe
39. erver for all of USAN and NSF sites It handles a special BBN diamond multimedia mailer and many other things It also is not guaranteed to be a pro duction machine since it was purchased as part of the USAN experimental project It is also there to do network research on and would not serve well in a production environment Ray wondered how much it would cost to buy a machine that would serve this function well for the NCAR divisions Rick Wolski AAP asked in terms of time and manpower and money how much it would take to get equal functionality out of the IBM 4381 IO machine Joe said it depends upon what type of functionality If functionality similar to the current implementation on the SCD Pyramid and HAO VAX is desired then there are problems in the Spartacus software and hardware that provides a TCP IP link on the IBM 4381 IO system electronic mail isn t work ing and the staff at Spartacus found out that they had never had it working in this version SCD is actively working with them remotely to try to get it to work There are no guarantees that SCD could use the IBM 4381 like the Pyramid and the VAXs are used today because of the mail problem Carl Mohr CSD said that if it requires more than two FTEs to get this functionality working on the IBM 4381 NCAR is losing money and should just get a Sun workstation to do it He recommends that SCD back off from putting too many resources into the IBM 4381 when it is obviously eas
40. f a factor of approximately 2 7 over COS The tests also compared performance of the SSD under COS and UNICOS UNICOS con sistently out performed COS by factors ranging from about 1 24 to 4 59 for sequential unfor matted I O of datasets on the SSD However the true significance of this improvement may not be apparent in the figures In order to approach the theoretical maximum transmission rate between the SSD and main memory large amounts of data must be transferred in order to compensate for system start up time The results presented by CRAY Research showed that under UNICOS there is much less system overhead and higher transmission rates were obtainable with smaller amounts of data UNICOS 2 0 provides an additional feature called Secondary Data Segments SDS that allows the system to treat the SSD as an extended memory device rather than as a fast disk UNICOS 2 0 implements this feature in a set of system calls future releases of UNICOS will make this feature available through FORTRAN READ and WRITE statements It allows the use of direct access files on the SSD Direct access files on the SSD are not allowed under COS and representatives of CRAY Research stated at the CUG meeting that there were no plans to include this feature Because of this a strict comparison between COS and UNICOS cannot be made however use of the UNICOS SDS feature resulted in SSD main memory transfer rates 2 18 to 25 66 times those obtained using COS Again
41. guidelines for using the CVMGx functions 1 DON T With CFT use the OPT PARTIALIFCON compile time option This causes CFT to compile one line IFs as if they had been replaced with OVMGx s However the compiler worries about the type 2 If you must use them don t use more than one in an expression The Record Volume 7 Number 12 24 December 1 1986 3 If you must use more than one in an expression use explicit type conversion functions REAL CVMGT 1 0 2 0 LTEST REAL CVMGT X Y LTEST2 4 Make sure that the assignment type and function argument types match Use X CVMGT 1 0 2 0 LTEST or even X IFIX CVMGT 1 2 LTEST not X CVMGT 1 2 LTEST 5 Don t even think about things like CVMGT 1 2 0 LOGICAL Finally if people think they are generic and want them to be generic why don t we make them generic We probably should have but when they were implemented the generic concept wasn t in CFT We can t change them now without potentially invalidating lots of old working programs AMA Change to OPTION Entries in NCARLB and LOCLIB on 11 06 86 by Richard Valent There are two versions of entry OPTION residing in libraries on the NCAR CRAY computers One version is provided by CRAY and resides in the system library SYSLIB The other ver sion is provided by SCD and resides in the NCAR System Plot Package NSPP These two entries are unrelated users specify CRAY job options with the former
42. he following products are available at reduced prices to NCAR UCAR members only Supplier Product ISSCO Level 2B GKS Package 4186 Sorrento Valley Blvd 1 200 machine Any machine San Diego Ca 92121 All device drivers no additional charge Attn Laura Reed Includes no maintenance or consulting GRAL TEMPLATE Level 2B GKS Package 9645 Scranton Road Dual pricing with and without maintenance San Diego Ca 92121 Hot line consulting with maintenance option Choice of two device drivers Computer Class Type Examples 2 Yr Support No Support I Cray 1 X MP Cray II 3 000 1 500 I IBM 309x IBM 308x 2 700 1 400 mo VAX 8600 8800 IBM 43xx 2 500 1 200 IV VAX 11 750 VAX 11 780 2 100 1 000 V VAX 11 730 PDP 11 xx 1 500 800 WS SUN APOLLO MVAX II 1 000 500 University of Lowell Level 2B GKS Package Research Foundation FORTRAN Source Code Lowell Ma 01854 500 per first machine type 200 per additional machine type To obtain a price list for the above software you can request the SCD document entitled Discount GKS Software Price List for NCAR UCAR Members from this address Scientific Computing Division National Center for Atmospheric Research P O Box 3000 Attn Mary Buck GKS Price List Boulder CO 80307 3000 GKS Software at NCAR SCD has purchased the GRAL TEMPLATE software and it is now available for use on the CRAY CX and CRAY C1 machines For access instructions contact Richard Valent CRAY Softwa
43. he graphics area and the ability to represent slices of the atmo sphere or slices of the model seem to be application independent and he thinks those are important areas for development Future Agenda The next SCD Users Group meeting will be on Monday November 17 1986 at 1 30 in the Damon Room Summary of Daily Bulletin Items CRAY Computers November 4 1986 AMENDED ITEM FOR CRAY USERS If you are using SEGLDR or LDR for jobs to run on the CRAY CX or SEGLDR for jobs to run on CRAY C1 the loading sequence has been changed so that NCARLB is loaded last rather than first This may affect programs that use the NCAR graphics package To avoid the potential naming conflict use LIB NCARLB SEGLDR CMD LIB NCARLB LDR LIB NCARLB November 10 1986 CRAY CX NEW USERS should read the information found by typing help xmpchang on the IBM 4381 IO front end computer This file contains information about necessary changes to your job structure such as the ACCOUNT card and the revised job classes The same information is in the SCD document CRAY Series Changing Your Job to Run on the CRAY X MP CRAY CX NEWS FILE has been created on the IBM 4381 front end computer for CX announcements that are of long term interest To access this file type news xmp To submit an item for the file contact Barbara Horner Miller at 303 497 1283 or send elec tronic mail TO HORNER A version of this file suitable for printing exi
44. ier and probably cleaner to do it by duplicating the Sun station Joe Choy said access must be provided to the IBM 4381 for local users and remote users who use it as a front end and that is mostly to support TELENET with full screen capabilities and FTP Ray Bovet said if they are already on a computer that would be talking TCP IP they may not be that interested in accessing the front end capabilities of the IBM 4381 and he is not sure that SCD has to make the TCP IP connection work easily for everyone on the machine He would rather support spending 80 000 to buy another Sun Joe said that for the local users at NCAR that may be true but there are many external users who use the IBM and need those facilities Ray said if they just have a terminal that s not talking TCP IP and want to talk to the IBM 4381 they can dial up through TELENET If they have TCP IP their machine is probably capable enough to serve as their own front end Joe said there are many users who are running PCs that can t handle that and they prefer to work inside their local environment A number of the USAN sites are doing that Carl Mohr wondered if the facilities would be needed if users have the capability to come in through a workstation Joe said that the best that many universities and individuals can afford is a PC Then there are some who use a ter minal on a machine that comes through NSFnet and they don t want to work in their local environment and are used to th
45. ion has been temporarily disabled Users who wish to run graphics jobs on the CRAY CX system must save their metacode files by storing them on the MSS for processing at a later time SCD staff members are studying ways to alleviate this problem on a more permanent basis The DROPJQ procedure to drop jobs from the CRAY CX job queue is now available on the CRAY CX computer and the IBM 4381 IO front end system DROPJQ functions the same way as on the CRAY C1 machine If you have questions on any of the above items please contact the Consulting Office at 303 497 1278 The Record Volume 7 Number 12 13 December 1 1986 News on NCAR Graphics and GKS by Bob Lackman NCAR Graphics The User Services Software Product Development Group is currently upgrading the NCAR Graphics Package to conform to the FORTRAN 77 and Graphical Kernel System GKS stan dards During this transition period two distinct versions of NCAR Graphics will be residing on computer systems at NCAR For the purposes of this article the pre GKS version is referred to as the old NCAR Graphics Package while the GKS version is designated as the new package NCAR GKS Software Release Status Beginning in August 1986 SCD distributed Release 1 of the GKS version of the NCAR Graph ics Package which included a software tape and User Manual The GKS version of the NCAR Package represents a major step toward standardization of the software This new version inc
46. ludes the 23 000 line Computer Graphics Metafile CGM translator package the System Plot Package Simulator SPPS and the Level OA GKS package In addition SCD staff have recoded the full set of high level utilities and test drivers to comply with the FORTRAN 77 and GKS standards However this initial release has produced a major demand for consulting support in such areas as installing the package on a diverse set of computers installing the CGM translator and making it drive various plotting devices building GRAPHCAP and FONTCAP tables for plot ting devices when these tables do not currently exist writing and installing the low level machine dependent primitives which are required for the package to run efficiently and taking trouble reports especially with respect to the new translator As a result of these demands SCD is suspending distribution of Release 1 Graphics staff are currently preparing an enhanced version Release 2 for distribution in Spring 1987 SCD is not currently accepting any orders for the GKS package Any orders that SCD receives from November 14 through mid April 1987 will be returned to the requesting party with a cover letter that recommends re ordering after May 1 1987 Orders received after mid April 1987 will be held until Release 2 is ready for distribution Due to the degree of difficulty associated with the installation of Release 1 of NCAR GKS graphics those sites which have already received a Release 1 t
47. ly monitored These datasets will not be deleted by the system in one day instead the retention period will be adjusted by the purge program Until this situation is resolved you should not assume that a test dataset on which you set a 1 day retention period will be deleted by the system If you want it deleted you must delete it using MSDELET from the CRAY or MSDELETE from the IBM VMSTATION the interactive CRAY software 11 10 86 The VMSTATION user should be familiar with the RECEIVE command which is documented in the CMS Command and Reference Manual PEEK NOTE and RDRLIST are part of this package dealing with spool files in the standard IBM network format Non IBM vendor software that interfaces to IBM software uses this form of communication Both the VMSTA TION and the TCP IP protocol use this package If you are disposing metacode to the VMSTA you must use the following form of the DISPOSE statement DISPOSE DN PLT DC PU DF BB TEXT LRECL 1440 NET YES The Record Volume 7 Number 12 12 December 1 1986 Once the file is on your IBM virtual reader you must use RECEIVE not RDR to read the file Type HELP RECEIVE to display the necessary information Note that the DF parameter must be set to BB and not BI in the DISPOSE statement To send this metacode to the DICOMED directly from your reader use the SENDD1 command Type HELP SENDDI1 for information If you are using the interactive feature of VMSTA and
48. mber 29 to October 3 The next CUG meeting will be held in April 1987 in New York City The theme of the meeting was Applications and Algorithms Over 200 attendees from over 50 CRAY sites participated as well as several representatives from CRAY Research Inc Three representatives from the Scientific Computing Division at NCAR attended the meeting Gary Jensen Manager of the Operations Section and chairman of the CUG Operations Special Interest Committee SIC Karen Friedman a technical writer in the Systems Section and Secretary of the CUG Board of Directors and myself a consultant and programmer in the User Services Section Participants discussed a wide variety of issues during the 3 day meeting Topics included FORTRAN I O performance issues in multitasking performance and features of CRI operat ing systems and compilers development and performance of numerical algorithms and applica tion programs and communications issues Representatives from CRAY Research and various CRAY sites presented papers and reports presented a paper entitled Solving Sparse Non Symmetric Linear Systems on a CRAY 1 using a Preconditioned Krylov Subspace Method at one of the Applications and Algorithms Ses sions and attended the general sessions the Software Tools SIC meeting the Applications and Algorithms sessions and most of the Performance and Software Tools sessions Due to the amount of information that I gained at this CUG meeting I ha
49. mmands FORTRAN Callable JCL 11 10 86 The TEXT field parameters on the FORTRAN callable JCL statements must terminate with a null character The CRAY documentation has always specified that all fields must terminate with nulls and in Release 1 15 CRAY has enforced this policy At NCAR blanks or nulls may be used to terminate any parameter except TEXT field parameters The TEXT field may contain blanks and therefore must terminate with a null You can easily force a null charac ter in several ways a by appending an L to a Hollerith constant b by concatenating a null byte to the end of a character string c by reading a character variable using an L format rather than an A format For example a CALL DISPOSE TEXT L FLNM USER DIR MODEL L b CHARACTER 40 TEXT TEXT FLNM USER DIR MODEL CHAR 0 CHARACTER 40 TEXT READ 5 100 TEXT 100 FORMAT L40 Job classes 11 10 86 The job class structure has changed for the X MP It will be changed on the Cl in December so that both machines use the same classes The classes were defined in the November issue of The Record To see the valid class structure from the IBM 4381 issue the command AID CLASS CRAY Memory limitations 11 10 86 Jobs running on the X MP may not use more than 6 million words of memory unless the Job is running in the monoprocessing job class X MP jobs requiring more than 2 million words of memory must use the MFL parameter on the JO
50. n with the installation and testing of the new CRAY X MP consultants will be attending a short coordinational meeting each morning on Tuesday and Thursday The Consulting Office will be closed from 08 40 08 55 each morning during this period Consultants for December are Ken Hansen Barb Horner Miller Mike Pernice Ann Cowley December 1986 Consulting Office Schedule P M Mike P I l l M ooo P M Mike P Ken H Mike P P M Mike P Ken H Ann Ken H Mike P P M Mike P Ken H Ann C HOLIDAY HOLIDAY Barb H M Ken H A P The Record Volume 7 Number 12 5 December 1 1986 Don t Let Your MSS Files Be Purged Please see the Mass Storage System News column on page 25 in the For The Record section for important information about Mass Storage System files Recent Policy Changes for the CRAY CX and CRAY C1 Computers As announced in the previous issue of The Record November 1986 NCAR s new CRAY X MP 48 supercomputer has arrived and has been through the initial check out by CRAY tech nicians and SCD Systems staff During this preliminary checkout selected users aided the Sys tems staff in running the new supercomputer through its paces The CRAY CX computer as the X MP has been designated was opened to all users on Monday November 10 The opening date had been postponed for one week due to a variety of problems with the hardware software and network links
51. nt will be frozen at the 1 16 release as part of the plans to provide a uniform environment In other words no new functionality will be added to COS but identified bugs will be fixed COS 1 16 is scheduled for release in February 1987 Development activity such as new features and per formance tuning will be restricted to UNICOS Consequently SCD is considering plans to install UNICOS as a GOS on NCAR s X MP and eventually migrate to a pure UNICOS environment however no definite schedule has yet been established for this migration Differences between COS and UNICOS that will affect the NCAR user community began to emerge at the fall CUG meeting These differences will be described next Currently only two CRAY sites run UNICOS as a GOS on an X MP Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill New Jersey is running it on a two processor X MP System resources are evenly divided between COS and UNICOS on weekdays On weekends they run a pure COS environ ment on one day and a pure UNICOS environment on the other UNICOS will accept batch commands and can be run as an interactive operating system and a batch operating system simultaneously Since their staff is already well versed in UNIX Bell Labs has experienced few problems in making the transition from COS to UNICOS A E R E Harwell has also installed UNICOS on one processor of a two processor X MP to serve as a transitional environment for a CRAY 2 They run both COS and UNICOS at all times UNI
52. oftware can be used both on a termi nal and on a PC to print out files at the printer The Record Volume 7 Number 12 29 December 1 1986 Ray Bovet said there had been some questions at the previous meeting about the exact amount between 8 and 30 terabits of NOAA data to be transferred from the TBM Margaret replied that it is simply a matter of how much money and resources can be devoted to it If NASA comes through with some resources as promised then it is 8 terabits any more is an uncer tainty Ray asked if this transfer has been going on while NCAR only has one CRAY Mar garet said yes but the Operations staff has been monitoring its impact Gene Schumacher SCD added that SCD has been shutting off the data hookup and had to shut it off a couple of times this weekend because of the enormous workload Paul Bailey ACD commented that he hasn t heard any official estimate of when the DICOMED would be handling GKS He has heard that they are making considerable progress on it that the translator is working and they are still working on the network interface and the titling etc Bob Lackman SCD said that John Humbrecht has been hired as a consultant to work with Lou Jones SCD to help get the titling going John Humbrecht originally wrote the code and will be starting this week Ray asked if this work is directed at transferring con trol of the DICOMEDs to the IBM 4381 Mass Storage Control Processor and Bob answered yes Margare
53. olding jobs that need the DICOMED You can run a job to DISPOSE the PLT file to the MSS and then retrieve the file later and stage it to the DICOMED processors The Record Volume 7 Number 12 11 December 1 1986 Miscellaneous 11 10 86 An error message to the effect that your JOB statement is missing can be caused by not having your ACCOUNT statement as the second statement in the job You may not place a comment between the JOB and ACCOUNT statements It might be that the US and AC fields are not the same or it might be that your job has a EOD statement followed by a EOF The code NED 1 M NED 1 M OR 00000000 produces the following error message HOLLERITH CONSTANT gt EIGHT CHARACTERS Putting the constant 00000000 into a variable fixes the problem You may not do an internal read if the internal unit identifier is greater than 152 characters You must use the substring feature of FORTRAN 77 instead For example CHARACTER BUFFER 300 PART 20 READ BUFFER 120 IVAL The READ will have to be replaced by the following PART BUFFER 1 20 READ PART I20 IVAL Charges are additive for each processor a job is using For example a job that uses 20 seconds on two processor will incur a 40 second charge There is currently a bug in the MSS software that resets the retention time parameter to one RT 1 The circumstances of this are unknown at this time but the situation is being care ful
54. other parts of the compiler CFT is notorious for lacking such structure which led to many of the problems encountered by users when moving from one version of CFT to another CFT77 s modular structure also provides a development base for CRAY Research to write optimizing compilers for other languages such as C and PASCAL Michael Pernice ts a programmer and consultant in the User Services Section of SCD The Record Volume 7 Number 12 23 December 1 1986 How the CVMGx Functions Work Editor s Note The following article was written by Peggy Botke and Dick Henderickson of the Compilers and Products section of CRAY Research Inc and was originally published in the February 1986 tssue of the CRAY Software Division Newsletter under the same title Barbara Horner Muiller of the User Services Consulting and Technical Support Group recommended that it be republished in The Record to help NCAR users resolve continuing problems with the use of CVMGz functions We extend our thanks to CRAY Research Inc for permission to republish the article a How The CCVMGx Functions Work Recently there have been several SPR s written that all purport to report problems with the various CVMGx functions These SPR s are almost always incorrect The CVMGx functions almost always work the way they were designed to work they were designed by a customer The problem is that users think that the functions are generic THEY ARE NOT THEY ARE BOOLEAN Thus
55. otiates a license Margaret confirmed that there is a C compiler on the CRAY X MP in support of the TCF package Stu Patterson s multi processor package That license is under negotiation Gene Schumacher added that it isn t in the library right now it is on site on tape but not on the X MP Ray Bovet asked whether it is SCD s plan at this point to provide a C compiler for both machines for use other than in conjunction with TCF Margaret said yes once it s licensed for the machine then it will be available Ray suspects other divisions are interested in it as well Margaret said the C compiler will be put on the CRAY machines when everyone is using UNICOS Rick Wolski AAP said he had a complaint from a user this morning who was trying to do some work on the CRAY 1A over the weekend Some very long Foreground 2 jobs were having their priorities significantly raised Bob Niffenegger SCD confirmed that Rick asked if that was what he meant by flushing them out Bob said that was correct Rick said the concern expressed was that if this sort of policy continues once the new charging algorithm is imple mented people will be paying for higher priority without actually getting it Bob said the only The Record Volume 7 Number 12 30 December 1 1986 other thing that could have been done that day was to drop the three jobs and they chose not to do that Operations chose to stop the CRAY and try to find out what was causing the problem by
56. piler has produced code that branches to 8 CONTINUE rather than to the 9 CONTINUE The compiler does issue a warning POSSIBLE JUMP INTO AN INACTIVE DO LOOP DO 10 DO 10 DO 10 DO 9 l IF GO TO 10 PGO TOS i l DO 10 DO 8 10 CONTINUE CONTINUE 9 CONTINUE 10 CONTINUE It should be noted that the code on the left in the above example does not conform to the FORTAN 77 standard It is technically a branch into the range of a DO loop 2 In at least one case the two additional lines of code shown on the right are needed to achieve the desired result This fix will make the code execute correctly on the X MP but does not conform to the 77 standard It changes the loop index within the loop DO 10 I 1 250 DO 10 I 1 250 KK J I M I I KK J M The Record Volume 7 Number 12 10 December 1 1986 3 OPT NOINVMOV can be added to your CFT statement so that CFT will not attempt to move invariants out of the loop If a loop appears to be misbehaving you might try this If it solves your problem please report the problem to the Consulting Office so we may pursue it further Note Doing this reduces the amount of optimization done by the compiler 4 The following loop structure generated a COMPILER ERROR both the GO TO and the double precision are required for the failure DO 390 LL 1 M L M LL l IF L EQ 0 GO TO 400 TEST DABS S L DABS S L
57. re Librarian at 303 497 1302 SCD has also purchased several copies of the GRAL TEMPLATE software for use on SCD front end computers and workstations Several of the NCAR divisions and SCD are currently evaluating the software product from the University of Lowell More information on this product will be published in The Record as it becomes available The Record Volume 7 Number 12 16 December 1 1986 Status of GKS on the NCAR CRAY Computers During the next several months User Services staff will be testing various combinations of GKS software with the GKS based NCAR utilities There are currently three possible combinations The utilities could be run with the NCAR Level 0A GKS software the University of Lowell Level 2B GKS software or the GRAL TEMPLATE Level 2B GKS software An article will be published in a future issue of The Record after this test period to discuss the test results and present the JCL needed to access these libraries for use on the CRAY C1 and CRAY CX com puters The SCD Systems Section plans to implement a new metacode translator for the DICOMED graphics plotter on the Mass Store Control Processor MSCP in January or February 1987 Systems staff estimate that a GRAPHCAP for the XEROX 4050 laser printers should be avail able at about the same time User Services hopes to have a stable set of GKS libraries avail able by then as well Although we have tried to make the conversion to GKS as transparent as po
58. rectly assigned to scientists The graphical utilities developed to display meteorological data were later generalized written in portable form and col lected into a graphics library SCD provides the FORTRAN source code for the package at no extra cost This feature has allowed the scientific projects to easily extend the current functionality to suit their specific needs Prototype extensions to the existing utilities are currently being developed within a number of the scientific projects Further extensions to the NCAR graphical library will originate from this source Software vendors do not ordi narily supply source code except at great additional cost The NCAR Graphics Package is inexpensive At a cost of 200 for software and documentation the NCAR package can be ported to any colleague at any university without great impact on limited departmental budgets Opportunities for Upgrades With the limited number of staff who are working on NCAR graphics it would take many years to implement the list of enhancements contained in the SCD Strategic Planning Report however SCD is exploring a number of different development alternatives 1 The NCAR Graphics Package has recently been accepted as the basis for the addition of a plotting capability into the SLATEC mathematical library Six DOE laboratories the NSF Supercomputer Centers NCAR and New York University have joined in a collabora tive effort to accomplish this goal The cr
59. res of the ASSIGN statement such as defining a file to be stored on the SSD are absent from UNICOS CRAY Research is studying ways to include these features in future versions of UNICOS and is also developing a UNICOS version of a network file server which will make datasets on remote mass storage accessible to jobs running under UNICOS CRAY Research recommends that migration of FORTRAN code be done in stages The appli cation program should first be running correctly under COS 1 15 using the CFT 1 15 compiler and SEGLDR instead of LDR The next step is to substitute the CFT77 compiler for CFT Finally the application program must be modified to run under UNICOS Differences in the way COS and UNICOS handle files must be dealt with Multiple file datasets are not supported under UNICOS File position is not preserved across job steps as in COS Instead UNICOS performs automatic rewinds However as mentioned above UNICOS will allow direct access files on the SSD while COS does not CRAY Research has been working on migrating codes from COS to UNICOS in order to gain experience provide documentation and training aids and identify problem areas where migra tion tools would be helpful This activity has already resulted in the migration tools mentioned above as well as improved performance of UNICOS 2 0 over previous releases Their experi ence has shown that the easiest FORTRAN application programs to migrate are computationally intensi
60. running some tests they wanted to figure out how to get those jobs through the machine because they were doing nothing but rolling in and rolling out A big problem was that many users were bringing up enormous amounts of data using it and then not getting rid of it until the end of their program Anyone that does that is not helping The disk scrubber just can t get out there and remove it fast enough About two months ago there were 15 users that all had Foreground 2 jobs with a field length over 730 000 which is about the maximum size SCD notified users then that from time to time they would have to pull out the utilities and shut other things down to get jobs out because some of them have been in the queue for four or five days Even running Express class doesn t help Editor s Note In response to this field length problem SCD has reduced the maximum allowable field length on the CRAY C1 com puter from 791 000 to 650 000 Any jobs that exceed this limit will be dropped Bob Nicol SCD who helps coordinate documentation for User Services informed the Group that the Documentation Group would like to solicit users to volunteer and help provide user feedback when requested by User Services If anyone would like to volunteer please contact him at 303 497 1249 Carl Mohr CSD wondered how long the TBM data converter software would be supported on the CRAY Bernie O Lear replied that users have two years to get their data converted on
61. sci ences by OASC He thinks this effort is very important and should be pursued with all vigor because to be a full fledged partner in NSFnet the RJE protocols need to be moving in the direction of the protocol standard In order to be a leader in that area it is very important for SCD to be playing that role in the community and it will also put it in good standing with the National Science Foundation which will be very helpful to Unidata Unidata is not build ing its own network it is relying on NSFnet efforts and on the SCD efforts He emphasized how important it is for SCD to take an aggressive posture towards networking The other side of the question is how the scientific divisions might help and participate in this Until there is a good consistent solution to the local data mangement problem which is consistent with the three classes of workstations Unidata cannot proceed into the applications area Most of the developments needed now are pre computer oriented Dave is engaging a commercial firm to help with the real time aspects of this problem NCAR should become a full fledged partici pant as the program moves into the applications area and Unidata systems are used for access ing the supercomputers about a year away Ray Bovet HAO asked how useful Unidata might be for users who aren t running meteorologi cal earth based atmospheric research He felt that certain aspects would be very valuable for users in HAO even though they
62. ssible there are a number of changes which may be required in user codes which call current plot primitives Users may elect to either access the pre GKS version or convert their codes to be compatible with the GKS version Documentation on the conversion process is available in the SCD docu ment entitled GKS Conversion Guide see the Documentation Update column in this issue for instructions on ordering SCD documentation Announcements concerning the GKS based libraries will be advertised in the Daily Bulletin and The Record as they become available During the remainder of fiscal 1987 we anticipate that a considerable percentage of staff time will be directed toward providing consulting service for the new package fixing bugs and help ing users convert their graphical codes from dependence on the old package to GKS Why Implement GKS at NCAR SCD is implementing GKS at NCAR for several reasons The first is simply to stay current with the ANSI and ISO graphics standards The creation acceptance and implementation of standards is an important part of reducing the complex maze which characterizes most current distributed computing environments A second reason is to allow SCD to acquire related graphics products from commercial sources We are providing a choice of several GKS pro ducts as well as the GKS based NCAR utilities We will also continue to survey the commer cial and public domain arenas for other high level GKS utility pa
63. sts as xmp print on the NCARLIBS 480 disk November 11 1986 CRAY CX EXPRESS 2 CLASS jobs have been limited to 5 mins The Record Volume 7 Number 12 37 December 1 1986 IBM 4881 IO Front end Computer October 21 1986 IBM 4381 USERS To read back copies of the Daily Bulletin type dailyarc It contains Daily Bulletins for the last month or since the last publication of The Record November 10 1986 IBM 4381 FRONT END IO COMPUTER installation of release 4 0 of CP beer place Mon Nov 10 at 08 00 Users should not be affected Software November 10 1986 DICOMED USERS Due to various problems 35 MM jobs were lost starting Sun Nov 9 at 08 00 The problem will be ERENER today November 12 1986 DICOMED USERS All 35 MM Mins were lost after 24 00 on Tues Nov 11 No 35 MM jobs can be run at this time The problems are being investigated November 14 1986 DICOMED USERS The 35 MM camera was returned to service today Nov 14 at 00 30 Miscellaneous October 30 1986 DOCUMENTATION CORRECTION The correct priority factor for Background 1 and Back ground 2 Job Classes is as follows Background 1 0 40 Background 2 0 33 This information is correct in the upcoming Nov Record article but it is incorrect in CRAY Series CRAY X MP and Data related ARTGER Version 1 Please correct the documentation at your site November 5 1986 SPECIAL CRAY X MP CONSULTING starts Mon Nov 10 and lasts through the
64. t NSFnet ARPANET or the internet the whole TCP IP world can submit jobs to any other machine using the same RJE protocols Within NCAR itself SCD would also like to get some feedback from each of the divisions about how they would like to have the internal networks within NCAR managed and overseen SCD would maintain its own network and the interconnections to its gateways the network inter connections that it has to all the external networks to the outside world and also the inter faces to each division However each division would essentially be running off its own sub network and be separated from SCD through a bridge box to isolate traffic The question for The Record Volume 7 Number 12 32 December 1 1986 each division is how much they want SCD to oversee and manage will it end at the interface box or would they like support assistance and consulting further into their own network SCD needs to know that in order to plan for appropriate personnel and resources Question amp Answer Session on Joe Choy s Presentation Ray Bovet asked how much the Sun 3 for USAN cost Joe said it is the new Sun 3 280 with 16 megabytes of memory and was in the low 80 000 range Ray asked if something in that capa city would be an adequate front end or be able to handle all of the NCAR internal traffic Joe answered there are other things that it does besides RJE It will handle a domain name server For mailing it has a central name s
65. t asked if Bernie O Lear could estimate when that will be a complete service Bernie said he expects it will be February Greg Woods HAO asked if that means that the CRAY will be generating metacode from the previous NCAR Graphics Package until then Bernie said yes Ron Gilliland HAO had two questions He said he tried to use the computer on Saturday and the residence time for files on the Cray disk was only about five minutes for very small files while the acquire time for the same small files was up to an hour so it was almost impossible to do any real computing Bob Niffenegger added that they had some problems Saturday Three users clogged the system and took 100 of all the disk storage on the machine between 9 00 a m and 4 00 p m They had to flush those users out of the machine Secondly there was another program that was so big they had to drop the MSS tape and some of the utilities pro grams to allow it to run Ron Gilliland said that he had a more serious problem this morning a couple of MSS files disappeared that he had created about 10 days ago He had acquired them over the weekend just fine but the response this morning was file does not exist Bob Niffenegger said they may have had a bad cartridge or something and asked Ron to get the information to Gene Schumacher SCD i Kent Sieckman ACD asked what the current state of the C compiler is on the CRAY X MP It is his understanding that it is down while SCD neg
66. the DICOMED processors the high speed printers and several front end computers The Ethernet network on the other hand supports just the front end machines on several interactive user systems and also an internal DECnet network that runs among the VMS machines That Ethernet also supports connections to users and the University Satellite Network USAN and a connection to NSF at the National Science Foundation network Not all of the front end systems are on the Ethernet and there has been a desire to be able to move to a common set of protocols that allow transparent methods for a user to transfer data and programs from their user systems and the CRAY sys tems through standard products protocols SCD would also like to be able to provide access to any available interactive debugging capabilities such as ICJOB The Record Volume 7 Number 12 31 December 1 1986 Joe said that SCD recognizes the need for gateways to be able to connect from the NCAR Eth ernet to the NLN and that the gateway should be uniform in how it appears to the user and in its access for users to make use of the supercomputing facilities at NCAR including the supercomputers MSS DICOMED high speed printers and so on The UCAR and NCAR Strategies in Supercomputing report of the UCAR NCAR Ad Hoc Committee on Strategic Planning of Computing Activities further emphasizes the need for gateways between the NLN and the Ethernet networks at UCAR If the recommendations
67. then asked how the committee arrived at 2 5 Noting the correction the minutes were approved Ray Bovet mentioned that the procedure for editing the SCDUG Users Group Meeting minutes would be changed In the past Karen Hack gave them to Frieda Garcia for editing but now Karen will send them directly to Ray Ray may call upon others in the Users Group periodi cally to assist in the editing process It was agreed that this was preferable to maintaining only a short summary of the minutes Report from SCD Acting Director Margaret Drake Margaret Drake SCD reported on the status of the CRAY X MP She expressed thanks to the users who are helping with the integration process and commented that the X MP is currently working fairly well although its integration has not been too smooth The connec tion to the Mass Storage System MSS is still weak and appears to fail about every six hours or so There are also periodic failures in the connection to the NCAR Local Network NLN It appears that the only reasonably solid connection is through the VM station software Because of the hardware instabilities SCD is currently asking users to run only in single proces sor mode If there aren t any more surprises SCD will still be on schedule and open the CRAY X MP up to general users on November 2 Editor s Note The user access period was delayed for one week due in part to the problems listed above Margaret asked if Gene Schumacher SCD woul
68. thes urged Margaret to solicit input from users through SCDUG for assistance in developing a long range NCAR wide strategy plan in order to respond to the committee s recommendations f Carl Mohr asked whether Paul Rotar had officially left SCD Margaret said no Rotar will be in Washington next week return to NCAR for the week after will be gone the following week and then return for the week of Thanksgiving He will be gone officially as of December 1 He is taking a leave of absence for one year with an option to continue for another year Bernie O Lear of SCD will be Acting Manager of the SCD Systems Section Ray Bovet wondered as Paul Rotar will be overseeing supercomputing matters if that might involve his coming back to NCAR from time to time Margaret said that there is nothing specific in the plans He will be in the Division of Advanced Scientific Computing and have responsibility for NSF s five supercomputing centers Suggestions and Problems Ray Bovet asked Carol Fey Chatfield ADM from the NCAR Library to comment on her past problem regarding the inability to make a hard copy from the screen image onto a printer Carol said she had her meeting with Dee Copelan SCD and Karon Kelly ADM However the problem was not solved until Phylecia Brandley SCD came across it in reading the minutes of the SCDUG meeting in last month s issue of The Record Phylecia notified Carol that the T command in the YTERM terminal emulation s
69. ve clean well structured and well documented and require only simple I O CRAY Research is also developing a self paced hands on tutorial for new users of UNICOS One unresolved problem that exists in UNICOS involves inter language communication Such problems occur when for example a FORTRAN program calls another module that was writ ten in C or PASCAL The problem can appear when calls are made from a FORTRAN pro gram to UNICOS which is written in C The example that was presented at the CUG meeting involved use of lower case FORTRAN source code that used an OPEN statement to create a file This problem arises primarily because there is no widely agreed upon industry standard for inter language communication CRAY Research is working on developing and enforcing an internal standard CUG is considering creating a SIC on UNICOS migration The Record Volume 7 Number 12 22 December 1 1986 CFT77 As part of its effort to establish a uniform environment on all of its mainframes CRAY Research released its new compiler CFT77 this past summer CFT77 is written in PASCAL and is intended to replace CFT consequently all future development will be concentrated in CFT77 and representatives of CRAY Research stated at the CUG meeting that CFT will be frozen at the 1 16 release CFT 1 16 is scheduled for release in June 1987 Using CFT77 should be relatively easy CRAY Research maintains that in general all codes that compile and execut
70. ve not attempted to summarize everything in this article since it would be too long for The Record or would omit too many important details to be of any use to the NCAR user community Instead I will pass on the information I gathered concerning two topics that will affect the NCAR user community in the near future the UNICOS operating system and the new CFT77 compiler If you would like information on the other topics listed above please feel free to contact me at 303 497 1238 The Record Volume 7 Number 12 19 December 1 1986 UNICOS UNICOS is a UNIX based operating system written in C that CRAY Research has been developing for the past two years Based on AT amp T s UNIX System V UNICOS is central to CRAY Research s goal of developing a uniform environment on all of its mainframe computers CRAY Research maintains that such a uniform environment eases program migration from one CRAY system to another Currently UNICOS is running on all CRAY 2 systems and on some X MP systems The CRAY X MP can also run in a dual operating system environment in which COS runs on some of the multiple processors and UNICOS runs on the others as a Guest Operating System GOS Due to differences in COS and UNICOS file formats running a GOS on an X MP requires partitioning of all the system resources including processors central memory I O subsystem disk drives and SSD At the meeting CRAY Research representatives stated that COS developme
71. y modifed for DEC VAX VMS machines is currently available from AAP for 200 00 This pack age includes a inch tape containing the software a copy of the NCAR GKS Graphics Manual and special supplemental documentation for VAX VMS implementations Ordering Instructions IMPORTANT NOTE To purchase the NCAR GKS software package you must first obtain an order form and purchase agreement from the address shown below All orders MUST be accompanied by a signed purchase agreement Any orders that do not follow these procedures will be returned Please allow a minimum of six weeks for delivery after receipt of the signed purchase agreement and prepaid check If a large number of orders are requested as a result of this article delivery time may be substantially longer To procure an order form and purchase agreement please write Mesoscale Research Section Atmospheric Analysis and Prediction Division National Center for Atmospheric Research P O Box 3000 Attn Pat Waukau GKS Software Distribution Boulder CO 80307 3000 The Record Volume 7 Number 12 15 December 1 1986 Commercial GKS Software Available As a service to NCAR UCAR the Software Product Development Group has arranged special pricing with commercial software suppliers on GKS products for NCAR UCAR member insti tutions Reductions of up to 50 off the already low educational discount price are now avail able for a variety of products At the time of this writing t
72. you enter your own JCL statements rather than using the C and L commands to compile and load your job you must RELEASE and DELETE the dataset you are compiling each time you wish to change and re compile it If you use the C and L commands in VMSTA this will be done for you You may find CRAY PROCs Procedures very useful if you are entering JCL line by line from the VMSTA Procedures are discussed in the COS manual and in the SCD manual entitled The CRAY 1 Computers A Guide to Supercomputing at NCAR All tape connections to the CRAY X MP for the next few months will be through the VMSTA TION See the VMSTATION documentation for details Mass Storage System 11 11 86 The users request that the FLNM rather than the PDN and ID fields be printed on the accounting sheets for ACQUIREs and DISPOSEs has been put in the work queue At this time no estimated date for this modification is available Additional Note The DICOMED graphics processors have been unable to keep up with the demand for film and fiche because of various production problems Due to the great numbers of very large graphics metacode files that have been generated on the CRAY CX system the DICOMED processors were overwhelmed when the network connection was completed between the DICOMED PDP 11 34 control processor and the CRAY CX machine and the limited disk space available on that controller was continuously flooded with data To alleviate this prob lem the network connect

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