Before You Start

There are a number of administrative things you must do before you can use the Concert System. They involve making sure you have all the required software and hardware, and actually obtaining the Concert System.

System Requirements

Before Concert is installed anywhere, you should make sure that you are using a machine powerful enough to run the system. The Concert System will run on Sparc2s and and Sparc10s, and it requires at least 32MB of RAM to run the compiler comfortably; even more memory will help performance when compiling large programs.

Getting and Installing Concert

The Concert System is publicly available from the Concurrent System Architecture Group at the University of Illinois. It will come as a tar file, and can be installed simply by untarring it. The Concert System relies on several software packages that must be installed on your system.

Emacs

must be installed to run the Concert Debugger and the Emacs interface to the Concert Compiler and Emulator. The interface has been tested with versions 18 and 19; if you have any other version, there are no guarantees.

gmake,

the GNU make program, is used to build Concert executables, so you cannot compile programs without it. Any version of gmake should work fine.

g++

is also used to build Concert executable, and the compiler cannot run without it. It must be at least version 2.4.5, but versions 2.5.x do not work due to known bugs in them.

All of these programs are freely available from numerous anonymous FTP sites; if you do not have one or more of them, use archie to find the FTP site nearest you. If you do not have archie, you can find all of these packages at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu.

More Information

This tutorial presents only an introduction to the Concert System, and the Concurrent Aggregates language that it implments. More detailed information is available in several papers; see the further reading section for details.