The SCSCP client for GAP is fully functional under GAP 4.4 and works in UNIX/Linux environments, Mac OS X (UNIX installation) and MS Windows.
The SCSCP server for GAP works in UNIX/Linux environments and Mac OS X (UNIX installation), but does not work under MS Windows. It is fully functional with the GAP development version and goes automatically into the compatibility mode to work with GAP 4.4.12 and earlier versions. The only limitation of this compatibility mode is that in the case of an error the break loop occurs on the server and can not be transmitted to the client (however, if the service consumer is the service provider himself/herself, then this is not as crucial as it might be in the general case). After the GAP 4.5 release the package will fully be compatible with the official GAP releases.
To use the SCSCP package it is necessary to install recent versions of GAP4 packages IO [Neu], GAPDoc [LN] and OpenMath [CKS].
The SCSCP package is distributed in standard formats (tar.gz
, tar.bz2
) and can be obtained from http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~alexk/scscp.htm or from the GAP web site (the latter also offers zoo
- and win.zip
-archives. To unpack the zoo
-archive the program unzoo
is needed, which can be obtained from the GAP homepage http://www.gap-system.org/ (see section `Distribution'). To install SCSCP package, put its zoo
-archive into the pkg
subdirectory of your GAP4.4 installation and enter the command unzoo -x scscp-X.X.X.zoo
, then the subdirectory scscp
(containing subdirectories doc
, lib
etc.) will be created in the pkg
subdirectory. Installation using other archive formats is performed in a similar way.
When there are no access rights to the root directory of the main GAP installation, it is also possible to install the package outside the GAP main directory by unpacking it inside a directory MYGAPDIR/pkg
. Then to load the package GAP should be started with -l ";MYGAPDIR"
option.
There are four files in the package which may need to be modified to setup and customise the package. The first three files are related with the server's functionality:
scscp/config.g
specifies:
default InfoLevel
for the InfoSCSCP
(9.2-3) class;
default SCSCP server name and port to be used by RunSCSCPserver
(5.2-1) if GAP is started with the scscp/example/myserver.g
file;
whether the server accepts calls to procedures which are standard OpenMath symbols, or only procedures installed in the transient content dictionary (see InstallSCSCPprocedure
(5.1-1));
service description to be returned to the client by GetServiceDescription
(5.3-1).
scscp/gapd.sh
is the script to start the GAP SCSCP server as a daemon. To use it, adjust the local call of GAP and, if necessary, call options (for example, memory usage, startup from the workspace etc.) and the location of the root directory of the SCSCP package in section 1 of this script.
scscp/example/myserver.g
is an example of the server configuration file which loads all necessary packages, reads all needed code, installs all procedures which will be exposed to the client and finally starts the SCSCP server (see Chapter 5).
The fourth file is related with the client's functionality for parallel computations:
The file scscp/configpar.g
assigns the global variable SCSCPservers
which specifies a list of hosts and ports to search for SCSCP services (which may be not only represented by GAP services, but also by another SCSCP-compliant systems). It will be used to run parallel computations with the SCSCP package (see Chapter 8).
See comments in these configuration files for further details and examples.
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