Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
G'Day I am guessing that a lot of people are in the same boat with regards to computing needs. We are planning our computing budget for H/W and S/W to take us into the year 2000. I would very much appreciate people's input as to the way to go. Our budget may well be in the 500-1000K pounds range. Generally we process and analyse around 10-20 Gigabytes of spacecraft data per year, and we expect this to increase by a factor of 100 (Cluster space mission is the culprit) by 1996. On top of this is atmospheric and MHD modelling, AI, Computer Vision, image processing etc.. projects competing for resources. Everyone here programs in Fortran, and a few of us in C, Forth, and C++. We don't want to reinvent the wheel for the upteenth time having just moved over from Vaxen to Unix machines. My proposal has been to go for a massively parallel system connected up to networks of PCs and workstations. This sounds reasonable given our processing needs. I am assuming that PCs will catch up in performance and storage to workstations, and workstations will have to go massively parallel to compete. I have been looking for S/W packages that we can use as our development environment, that will be easily ported to a parallel system, and where we can easily import our F77 and C code. This would save us a lot of development time. So far no luck. Seems like the S/W developers are just looking 1-2 years ahead (if that :-( Data storage has been another headache given the rapid development of R/W optical discs. Seems like every month a better, faster, cheaper system is released. Basically help !!! regards Ata <(|)> -- | Mail Dr Ata Etemadi, Blackett Laboratory, | | Space and Atmospheric Physics Group, | | Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, | | Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BZ, ENGLAND | | Internet/Arpanet/Earn/Bitnet atae@spva.ph.ic.ac.uk or ata@c.mssl.ucl.ac.uk | | Span SPVA::atae or MSSLC:atae | | UUCP/Usenet atae%spva.ph.ic@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk |