tcora@PICA.ARMY.MIL (Tom Coradeschi) (07/25/90)
Hello out there... I've been lurking here for some time now, as my interests have been more academic than practical. However. As with all other things in life, that seems to be a thing of the past. In the near future, we will be bridging our Ethernet (TCP/IP) to our PhoneNet (AppleTalk). The question is, how? Our requirements look something like this. We're writing a fairly hairy simulation of electromagnetic railgun system performance. That includes power supply, switches, launchers, the works. Needless to say, in its present form, it ties up an SE/30 for around 45 minutes/run! We want to run the code on our Silicon Graphics - Iris 4D/80. Make use of its number-crunching capabilities, and free up the macs. So. We need to provide telnet logins from macs to the Iris (nominally using NCSA Telnet), so folks can create input files, run the code, etc. It would also be nice if we could mount unix directories on the macs, so folks could directly access input files and output files. This way plotting and so forth could be done on the macs, allowing for easy integration of output into papers and such. I'm looking for recommendations as to how to do this. I basically see that there are two popular combinations. 1) Kinetics/Shiva/?? FastPath/Kstar/CAP or 2) Cayman GatorBox/???. Both these packages allow unix directories to be mounted as virtual disks on the macs (right?), basically by turning them into big AppleShare file servers. The Iris speaks NFS, as well (I think that matters). I'd like to hear what folks have done at their sites, particularly with requirements similar to ours, and what the pitfalls and bottlenecks of their particular implementations have been. Of course, if there are other viable means of accomplishing these ends, I'd like to hear about them too... Thanks in advance, tom coradeschi <+> tcora@pica.army.mil <+> tcora@dacth01.bitnet