spl@mcnc.org (Steve Lamont) (06/12/89)
Gentlefolk: The North Carolina Supercomputing Center is currently looking at high powered graphics workstations from a number of different vendors, including (in alphabetical order) Ardent, Silicon Graphics, Stellar, and Sun (among others). These systems (some call them "graphics supercomputers") will be used in our scientific visualization lab and as computational scientist's workstations, in other words, as both shared and semi-private resources. I'd like to solicit user comments about these or any other machines that you might think appropriate in the pursuit of computational scientific endeavors. For example, what graphics tools are available? How well do the tools perform? How easy are they to use? What is the general level of performance (megaflops, nurbs, polygons per second, etc)? Would you buy another? If so, why? If not, why not? I'd also like to know what applications you run, either personally or in your "shop," what the configuration(s) is/are, including disks, processors, vector units (if applicable), network connections and configurations (hyperchannel, Ultrabus, ethernet), etc. What sort of environment do these workstations exist in? Supercomputer? Minisuper? Mainframe? Standalone? Please E-Mail your responses to me at spl@ncsc.org (I've rather extensively cross posted this message, including to groups which I do not normally read) and I'll summarize in about two weeks on comp.graphics. -- spl Steve Lamont, sciViGuy EMail: spl@ncsc.org North Carolina Supercomputing Center Phone: (919) 248-1120 Box 12732/RTP, NC 27709