CERN Accelerating science

CERNLIB Support for Windows/NT

CERN Program Library Office CN/ASD

Introduction

The importance of commodity computing for HEP experiments, particularly for the LHC era, is becoming increasingly widely accepted. A number of proposals have been made to investigate the suitability of Windows/NT and evaluate its potential role in HEP computing. Consequently, we plan that Windows/NT, initially for Intel hardware and the Microsoft Fortran Powerstation V4 compiler, will become a fully supported CERNLIB platform by the end of 1996.

It is a major tenent of this work that the primary focus be LHC era experiments, and not, at least initially, LEP and other pre-LHC experiments. A summary of the overall strategy for CERNLIB on NT is as follows:

• Initially, only Intel hardware and the Microsoft Fortran Powerstation V4 compiler will be supported.
• CERNLIB for NT will concentrate on the requirements of future (LHC) experiments.
• Legacy applications will not be supported, unless a strong demand arises from pre-LHC experiments.
• NT will be used to prototype the future CERNLIB environment (C++, component-ware etc.)

CERNLIB environment on NT

A preliminary version of CERNLIB already exists for NT on Alpha systems. However, this version is essentially unused and hence backward compatibility is not an issue. We therefore propose to combine the release of an officially supported NT version of CERNLIB with a general clean-up of the library (for NT only!) This implies that obsolete tools and packages will not be supported, whereas a number of new developments, such as the Tcl/Tk

version of PAW, will be first introduced on this platform.

To be more explicit:

• PATCHY and CMZ will not be made available in the CERNLIB tree. The recommended tools for code management will be the combination of CVS, Imake, makedepend, gmake and the C preprocessor, which are not only industry standards but also the de-facto standard for most new HEP experiments. (Note that we do not currently intend to install CVS on NT. Our working model is that the code repository will reside on a Unix system, e.g. in AFS. Imake, gmake, makedepend and the C preprocessor will, however, be available on NT.)
• Packages which are not used by the LHC experiments for their current prototyping will not be ported. This includes ZBOOK, KAPACK etc. We would also propose to drop any packages not required by the LHC experiments in the medium term, i.e. CSPACK, EPIO, FATMEN, HEPDB. We realise that both FFREAD and KUIP are still heavily used. We would nevertheless suggest that only the line-mode version of KUIP be supported, with Tcl/Tk as the preferred solution (already adopted by many experiments).

Prototyping of a `cernlib++' environment

The NT platform offers us an ideal opportunity for prototyping the new cernlib++ environment currently being discussed in the Libraries for HEP Computing (LHC++) working group. Not only may new class libraries and tools be installed and evaluated, but we can also gain experience with new technologies such as component ware. In addition, we can experiment with the interoperability of CORBA -- Compliant Object Request Brokers and OLE.