Lemme preface this by telling you I am working with perl and fortran-like code created by Physics majors with Makefiles that in some instance come close to industry standards but in most cases are ugly hacked bastardizations of software engineering. Shits ugly. And frustrating.

Anyway, I'm not will versed in Makefiles myself, and trying to reverse engineer some of the ~1000 line Makefiles (is that normal in your experience?) to fully understand them is out of the question.

But, in some instances, some targets come pretty close to a standard, and I am wandering if I can graft lsf or some other mechanism onto them to speed along my compilation.

Basically, we have quite a few compute servers available that I can fork execution to, but I'm not sure how to roll that into the Makefile so that it will fire off a compile on every one that is available, and do it without too much re-work of the Makefile. In short, I am wondering if I can add a few extra lines to a given target to include batch compilation, or is it something I'm going to have to do from the beginning and with more setup to make work?

6/30/2008 4:02:43 PM

You mean to tell me at a school with a computer science program in a forum that should be attracting same said students, I can't even get a single reply to this topic?

Jesus.

7/2/2008 8:59:55 AM

I think you're greatly overestimating the Computer Science department.

7/2/2008 9:03:29 AM

i haven't used a make file in 10 years

7/2/2008 9:06:08 AM

^^ Rofl. No, I know all about it, which is why I made that jab with the second post.

^ I graduated with CPE/EE degrees with 1 semester of C++, 1 of java, and one of those half courses of perl (with John Borwick (sp?), if any of you know him), so I don't have enough depth or experience to really tackle this stuff like I'd like. It's structured so poorly, that to really do it all right, it needs to be examined and reconstructed from the ground up with a proper architect and properly trained software guys doing the work. I still use SCCS for my repository though other groups have moved on to CVS because of us, that's how far behind we are in terms of technology. Two years ago, with the green light from our manager here, we raised a real stink about the arcane config management setup we have (SCCS + self maintained perl scrip + file naming convention), tried to push Clearcase or perhaps Perforce on them, but they had their minds made up on CVS before we got there. Now, over two years later we still struggle with bug propagation and merge headaches because the physics PHds that think they know software refuse to aknowledge standardized software engineering practices. As a remote site, the mothership gets real defensive when you try to tell them they don't know what the fuck is going on.

/rant

7/2/2008 10:03:18 AM