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[previous article] [next article]The Sun4 version of IMSL has been installed. Since this took longer than was originally expected, you might be curious about what goes into an IMSL installation.
The ECN gets the IMSL software in source form. In the current version, IMSL 10.0, there are one million lines of code in 4241 files. The source for the library is grouped by function into three directories; math, stat and special functions (sfun). Simply compiling the library takes about four days. This produces a usable, but untested, library which is 14 Megabytes in size.
Fortunately IMSL also provides a test suite. The IMSL test suite is composed of 2344 files, or a little over 200,000 lines of code. The function of the test suite is to exercise all of the IMSL functions by using the library to calculate values and then comparing these results with known results. Compiling the tests take almost a full day. The execution of the test suite runs about 10 hours, producing about 200 pages of output, which is then visually inspected for errors.
After the test suite has been run and all the functions have been verified as acceptable, the library is ready for installation and use.
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