Re:Computer and compiler questions

Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 22:26:25 +0100 From: Pierre Maitre <maitre@cdg.ch> Subject: Re:Computer and compiler questions Dear Mr Zarate Installing NONMEM on Intel/Linux is straightforward, just use the setup procedure described under the UNIX section of the NONMEM installation manual. I would think that the installation is almost identical for Alfa/Linux. If your media is a 3.5" diskette (DOS version of NONMEM) you will have to change the numbers in the the BLKDAT subroutine to numbers specific to the alfa cpu. A problem you may also encounter is that the DOS "end of line" is CR LF , unlike linux that use the UNIX convention LF. You may overcome this problem by manually editing the NONMEM source files with the editor vi , and get rid of the last character (^M) with the global command ":1,$ g/.$/s///" Don't buy any fortran compiler, it's all in linux for free. The front end of the compiler is called g77 (or f77 in the RedHat linux 6.0 version I am using). It actually translates the fortran code into C code, and then compiles the C code. For the user, this procedure is totally transparent and NONMEM can be compiled without problems. Various options of f77 are listed in the man page (type "man f77" or "man g77"). The executable obtained using the generic Linux f77 translator/compiler is very fast, although I have no other compiler on my machine to compare with. A benchmark comparing the performance of my old SUN SparcStation IPC that I used so far and Linux on my PC (a regular Pentium 350 MHz) showed that I can add the SUN to my personal collection of old computers: for the same NONMEM problem , the SUN cpu time was 35 min, whereas the PC cpu time with RedHat Linux was 42 seconds! 50 times faster! No need to say, the numerical results were identical. I am more than happy with that and will certainly not look after a third party "optimized compiler" for a 5 or 10% gain in speed. Finally, why are you planning to use a concomittant Windows version of NONMEM? For what task? The best solution is to run NONMEM with Linux on a regular PC. Most of the Windows programs will run under Linux using the Windows emulator (wine) that comes with linux for free. And you have a generic spredsheet (gnumeric) that reads your Excel files. And a free Office 97 clone (StarOffice) that reads your Word files and presentation manager files. And if your PC has both linux and windows, linux can even mount your windows partitions and access your windows programs and windows data files. On linux (as on unix) you have lots of utilities like awk or perl to manipulate or transform your data or your NONMEM output, as well as lots of graphical tools like gv or gnuplot to generate a graphical picture of the NONMEM figures. For this purpose, the Windows environnement is not as confortable. Best regards Pierre Maitre Genolier / Geneva / Switzerland