Re: NEC-LIST: Compiling NEC4 using Intel Visual FORTRAN 11.1.065 for W7x64

Hi Phil,

At the risk of having the blind lead the blind here was my experience.

A couple of years ago I took a test drive of 'Visual' Fortran, version
10.x.xxx.
I was attempting to compile for Windows Vista x32 and 2gb ram. I had some
issues.

First was the Fortran demo version did not include any 'visual' IDE, but
rather expected one to have MS Visual Studio installed and working prior to
installing the fortran compiler. Second issue was that my version of Visual
Studio was newer than what Intel expected (I was using the latest beta
version of VS). I was never able to get the two working together
satisfactorily so I then had to resort to just manually compiling NEC-4 from
the command line.

It's been a while so I may not have the details correct, but I seem to
recall having trouble getting some of the libraries to link properly. I
believe I had to recompile either or both MSFLIB and IFPORT to get it to
properly compile. Once I did that I was able to get a clean compile and link
with no complaint.

The other issue involved the timer routines. I can't remember exactly what
I did, but I had to rewrite the code to make it use one of the Visual
Fortran routines that actually did work as advertised. Seems there was a
bug in their codebase which either caused the routine to fail, or to return
a value which was less than the precision the language specified. I went
round and round with the very nice lady from tech support over that one
until finally she was able to get 'the developers' to acknowledge a problem
and I was assured that it would be fixed in a later version. I never did
try the later version, I just changed the required locations (I'm thinking
there were 20 some locations but I could be wrong) to use my patched
SECOND(SECNDS) routine.

Finally, I spent a lot of time playing around with the compile and link
switches to find out which worked best. Your CPU is way different and newer
than mine, so what I used probably wouldn't be that great for your use.
There are however, a multitude of switches available which should help you
tweak your output to get blazing performance. I found I was able to get a
4.5 times speedup over the old MS Fortran compiler I had been using, and I
believe the results were something on the order of twice as fast as the
supplied EXE's from LLNL. All in all, it was well worth the effort. Lots
of nice features in the Intel Fortran package for sure.

Personally, I wouldn't want to change the array sizes directly, just use
MAXSEG and MAXMAT as necessary in the NECPAR.INC file to use all your ram.
With 8GB of ram and all the latest compiler optimizations, you'll be very
pleased at the results.

Good luck.

73, Pat K7KR

"Phil Ede" <phil.ede_at_tiscali.co.uk> writes:

W7x64

> Dear friends
>
> I have just started compiling NEC4 double precision using the latest Intel
> Visual FORTRAN
> compiler v 11.1.065 to run under Windows 7 x64, on an i7 930 processor
> with 12 GB RAM
>
> I last compiled NEC4 using a Compaq compiler 10 years ago and it was a
> breeze.
> However, this compiler seems to be much more fussy and is throwing out
> mismatches between actual and dummy arguments.
>
> Do any arrays have to be resized to compile for up to 8GB RAM,
> or do I just change the dimensions in the NECPAR.INC
>
> I have not done any intensive FORTRAN prgramming for over 20 years and
> I would be most grateful if anyone can give me some tips and shortcuts
>
>
> Phil Ede
>
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> NEC-List_at_robomod.net
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