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