Installing Babel on BG/P (Surveyor at Argonne)

I do not recommend that anyone tries this unless they want to spend a lot of time waiting for configure scripts to complete (e.g., on my laptop, babel configure takes 2.5 minutes, while on the BG/P it takes at least 20 minutes, depending on various options).

1. First of all, I started out with the goal of getting as many languages supported as possible, including python. This meant that I had to install NumPy? first, which turned out to be nontrivial (see description).

2. I discovered that the following prerequisites were necessary: libxml2, then zlib. The former was required for Python support (so the fact that Babel includes libparsifal does not remove the dependence on libxml2 if you want Python). The latter was required by libxml2. 2.a zlib-1.2.3 was configured with:

./configure --prefix=/home/norris/cca

and then I had to manually change the values of the CC and LDSHARED variables since zlib does not have a real configure. The values were CC=mpixlc and LDSHARED=mpixlc (I think you only really need CC).

2.b libxml2-2.7.3 was configured with

./configure --prefix=/home/norris/cca CC=mpixlc CXX=mpixlcxx F90=mpixlf2003 F77=mpixlf77 \
  CPP='gcc -E' --with-python=/bgsys/drivers/ppcfloor/gnu-linux/bin/python --with-zlib=/home/norris/cca \
  --disable-shared --enable-static