sPHENIX discussion of software

[David Morrison <dave AT bnl.gov>]

Hi all,

Would it be possible to develop our shiny new sPHENIX code with a compiler a bit shinier and newer than we are currently using on RCF?  The version of GCC there is five years old:

rcas2068% gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-3)
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

A current-day installation of, say, Ubuntu would come with GCC 4.9.x.  If we also allow ourselves to use some features of C++11/14, we could write simpler code that makes intention clearer.  Things like “nullptr", the “auto” declaration, range-based “for” loops, and lambda expressions can help clear away a lot of syntactic clutter.  Even if you think egghead things like closures and lambda-over-lambda iteration are nuts and should be avoided like the plague, you’ll love the simplicity of the auto declaration.

It’s always been hard to update compilers on a big shared facility like the RCF – is that still true?  Now that we live in the future, do we have virtual machines with whatever environment we want? 

I do realize this is not the most important sPHENIX computing issue out there, but it’ll bother me if I don’t raise it.

Dave

David Morrison Brookhaven National Laboratory phone: 631-344-5840
Physics Department, Bldg 510 C email: dave AT bnl.gov
Upton, NY 11973-5000

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