Central Systems Group Report

a)EMAS

     It became apparent during this period that certain features of  the  EMAS-3
subsystem,  particularly around the Parameter Acquistion Mechanism (PAM), caused
a disproportionate amount of work when programs or packages are moved from 2900.
This  area has been simplified and re-implemented so that program importation is
now much easier. The main benefits of the previous design have been retained, in
particular  the  consistent  prompting and defaulting arrangements of PAM.   One
consequence change at this late stage is that much of the HELP  information  and
documentation,  which had been prepared well in advance, has had to be withdrawn
for revision.

     The permanent front end hardware and software entered service in  the  last
weeek  of  September  and some teething problems persisted into the User service
which started in October.   The interim front end ancient hardware has given  an
unexpectedly reliable service througout the development period.

     The Service system as at 1st October has all the main  components  -  viz:-
Supervisor, Director, Backup, Spooler, Batchjobs, File Transfer, Mail, Subsytem,
Imp and Fortran - present and working. Some of the lesser used areas are in need
of  more  work  and the contributed Libraries ERCLIB & CONLIB are still short of
substantial amounts of material.   The latter,   of course,    is  not  an  ERCC
responsibilty though some items are widely used.

     The MVS simulator (VSS) has made great strides  and  has  enabled  the  IBM
Fortran Compiler, the Linkage Editor and the packages Clustan and SPSS to be run
on EMAS-3. It can handle heavily overlaid programs although the normal intention
is  to  obtain versions of the Packages without overlays wherever possible.   It
seems likely that this route will enable much software to be purchased and  made
available easily.  It should also be possible to package up imported software so
that it can be accessed via the normal EMAS Command interface.   There are  some
time  penalties for running via a simulator but it seems these will be small for
CPU bound programs but appreciable for I/O dominated ones.


B) ERCVAX VMS Service

     Work on the VAX this summer  has  be  confined  (because  of  holidays)  to
installing  the  latest  version  of  the  VMS  operating system and keeping the
service ticking over. Consideration is being given to filling some ommissions in
the  facilities  in  VMS such as an archiving system,   a mechanism for reliably
providing large amounts of scratch file space,   implementing a "funds"  scheme,
similar  to  that  used  on  EMAS,   facilities for handling IBM labelled tapes,
project accounting etc.  These items have been under consideration for some time
but  as  yet effort has not been found to really get to grips with these topics.
The backup mechanisms have undergone considerable revision recently and now have
settled down, user files being recovered reliably.


                                       P.Stephens&B.MURDOCH.    4th Oct 85.