annala@neuro.usc.edu (A J Annala) (10/08/89)
I am considering the acquisition of a very small number of MacII/ci systems to supplement SUN-III workstations for 2D image processing, reconstruction of 3D images from serial sections, synthetic image generation, modeling of large biological neural networks, and general laboratory computing tasks. I would appreciate it if someone could send me some detailed advice on the following matters: o configuration options/compatibility/quality of MacII network capabilities: o TCP/IP, telnet, rlogin, rsh, ftp, bsd sockets, rpc, SUN NFS server/client o availability/support on MacII for X11R2/R3/R4, PEX, XView (new SunWindows) o configuration options/quality of MacII image processing/graphics products o high res grey scale/pseudocolor/fullcolor frame grabbers/displays o real time acquisition of sequential frames? real time averaging? o NTSC/PAL/RGB input/output? generates/accepts genlock? o documentation of display system gamma, chromicity coordinates? o high quality public domain and/or low cost commercial imaging packages? o ports of Army BRLCAD, NOAO IRAF, Ardent DORE, RenderMan, MOVIE.BYU o configuration options/compatibility/quality of system development tools o cc / f77 / gnu cc / c++ / pascal / debuggers / profilers / vi / emacs o low cost operating source code availablity for academic institutions o high bandwidth / high capacity read/write, write only, backup mass media o non SCSI (e.g. SMD, ESDI, parallel transfer) controllers & disk drives o worm laser disks, omdr (real time magnetic disk video recorder) o qic-24 (or similar industry standard) compatible cartridge tape drives o how do these devices compare to the new Sun 32 bit SMD4 688 MB drives? o how much real memory can you put in a MacIIcx? how much virtual memory is available? how much cache memory is available and how is it implemented? o what kind of floating point processor/co processor is available and used by the common system development tools (e.g. cc, f77, gnu cc)? what is the floating point format (IEEE? extended precision available?) o how resilient is the unix file system against power failure/system crash? o how much disk needs to be set aside for the operating system, swap space, etc? o if it's any help, for my current SUN-III/160C-P8 system with a single user some of out applications don't run well with less than 60 MB swap space. o 200K frames/sec parallel dma cmos/ttl interface cards with 32+ i/o lines avail? o What can you do if you need more than 3 NuBus slots? Is there a fully powered expansion chassis available? Does that even make sense with NuBus? o Does anyone make a MacII to VME bus adaptor? o Does an intelligent distributed MacII editor/front end for Cray UNICOS exist? o Are there any grants available from Apple to support development / conversion / demonstration projects using MacIIci's for scientific computing/visualization? Thanks, AJ