See below for pointers to other sources of information.

Slow Controls Alpha Migration

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My October 1996 talk, Slow Controls Alpha Migration: colour compressed, monochrome compressed, colour uncompressed, monochrome uncompressed.

The status report presented by Robert to the Run Review Workshop (April 1997) is also available: colour compressed, monochrome compressed, colour uncompressed, monochrome uncompressed.

Some Details

Useful Compiler Options

Use to check code, then restore alignment if possible.

FORTRAN/OPTIMIZE/SEPARATE_COMPILATION/NOALIGNMENT

/SEPARATE_COMPILATION: is slightly less efficient, but simplifies object library management
/OPTIMIZE: required for all compile-time checks (eg. uninitialised valiables) to be done
/NOALIGNMENT: gives the same alignment as on the VAX. With /WARNING=ALIGNMENT (default), will warn of any problem areas so you can decide whether to use Alpha ("natural") or VAX (very inefficient on Alpha) alignment.

CC/STANDARD=VAXC/NOMEMBER_ALIGNMENT

These have been set up by default on the online cluster (symbol CC). This can be confusing, because this is not the case on eg. VXCERN.

Things to Watch

If you use any global sections, these must be an integral number of pages long and be aligned on a page boundary. On the VAX this was 512 bytes, but is increased to 8k (for the moment) on the Alpha. The EP's local store, defined in EP_COMMON.INC, has this forced in EP_PLATFORM_'node_arch'.INC.
LIB$ESTABLISH is no longer a VMS run-time library routine. Use Fortran intrinsic (don't declare it EXTERNAL).
Argument list routines (eg. NARGS) don't work on Alpha. Use Fortran/C intrinsics (eg. Fortran's IARGCOUNT).
See the note about procedure arguments in RPC_DIR:RPC.NEWS if you call any of the following specialised RPC run-time support routines from Fortran or C (or anything other than Pascal) on the Alpha: RPC_Attach_Stub, RPC_Establish, RPC_Queue_Server, RPC_Tell_Me (or the internal routines RPC_Specify_Stub, TS_When_Receive, or TC_When_Receive). These calls are handled correctly by the compiler-generated stubs, so you don't have to worry unless you coded the calls yourself.

Example of how to rebuild a modified EP

$ SET DEFAULT DETECTOR$SPECIFIC:[SC.EP.SOURCE]
$ FORTRAN/OPTIMIZE/SEPARATE/NOALIGN EPD /OBJECT=[-.'node_arch']
$ SET DEFAULT [-.'node_arch']
$ LIBRARY/CREATE EPD EPD
$ COPY EP_EXE:EP_V49.OLB *
$ @EP_DIR:EP.MAKE
Version? V49_DBMCALB
Link to EPD_SHARE [Yes]? NO         ! link to EPD.OLB

And to run it, use

$ @EP_DIR:EP det sub/DBMCALB -
    /EP_EXE=DETECTOR$SPECIFIC:[SC.EP.'node_arch'] -
    /EP_DIR=DETECTOR$SPECIFIC:[SC.EP]

By default, on the VAX, EP_EXE is the same as EP_DIR, while on the Alpha it points to the [.AXP] subdirectory. There is no [.VAX] subdirectory (this is so that existing copies of EP.COM will continue to work on the VAX).

Other Sources of Information

Alpha Migration of the DELPHI online cluster
New MHI Library
HIPE and HIPE Server migration news.
SMI state manager process migration news

10th October 1996

Tim Adye, <T.J.Adye@rl.ac.uk>