# ACEDB User Group Newsletter - July 2004

If you want to have this newsletter mailed to you or you want to make comments/suggestions about the format/content then send an email to acedb@sanger.ac.uk.

Acedb goes live on the Opteron !

## General News

### Acedb on the AMD Opteron !

(Thanks to Duncan Napier who is the true hero of this article dgnapier@sfu.ca)

Acedb has been ported to run on machines using AMD's Opteron chip (this is the AMD 64-bit Intel compatible chip).

After lots of email exchange with Duncan Napier and some good debugging by him, it turned out that a simple one line change was all that was needed:

          /* NEW ADDITION for the AMD64/Opteron */
          #if defined(__x86_64__)
          #  define STACK_ALIGNMENT 8
          #endif

This change in wh/mystdlib.h ensures that the acedb code when compiled for the opteron uses a stack word length of 8 bytes.

The main work to port acedb onto 64-bit machines was done about 10 years ago for the then DEC (subsequently COMPAQ, now HP) Alpha chip. This allowed rapid porting subsequently to SGI, HP and IBM-6000 machines.

To be able to configure acedb so easily for this new chip, which is bound to become very popular over the next 2 or 3 years, is a definite coup, proving once again the great portability of the ACEDB kernel.

Thanks Duncan !

## July no monthly build available.

A monthly build incorporating Duncans port to the Opteron will be available by mid August along with a number of fixes. More news next month.

You can pick up the monthly builds from:

Sanger users
  ~acedb/RELEASE.DEVELOPMENT
External users
  http://www.acedb.org/Software/Downloads/monthly.shtml

Last modified: Tue Aug 10 10:48:17 BST 2004