Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 12:49:32 09/14/99
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On September 14, 1999 at 12:22:24, Zachariah Amela wrote: >> >>You would be _amazed_ if you took a tour thru the various weapons labs like >>LLNL, LANL, ORNL, ONR, ARL, etc... and noticed _all_ the Linux boxes they are >>now using. > >Wow really? Have you worked w/ any of these weapons development labs?? I >always found the science most interesting. > Time for a history lesson... :) Harry Nelson, my partner in Cray Blitz, worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Harry was/is considered the premier expert on Cray assembly language/ architecture in the entire world, and has worked as a consultant to Cray for 20+ years. I have spent many a visit out at Livermore tweaking Cray Blitz for the next tournament... "Lachex" was written at the Los Alamos National Laboratory by Dr. Burton Wendroff. Burt and I have been friends almost forever, it seems, and he is still occasionally active on ICC with a handle of 'firefly' for his current chess program. I have spent many days visiting at Los Alamos also, visiting Burt, as Harry could always finagle a visit to LANL himself so that we could get together. :) >I understand SGI Irix systems are used for a lot of the militarys satellite >imaging. How does Irix compare w/ Linux? Do the 'play together' well, or not? Works fine. In fact, lots of SGI boxes are running Linux, just like a lot of sun boxes are, because IRIX is not 'great' by any measure... > >> >>Sun is still around, but they are falling further and further behind every >>month, for reasons that are unknown to me. But basically, their ultra-sparc >>cpus are about the worst processor you can currently buy if you want raw cpu >>speed. I can't think of a single machine (current cpu) that the ultra-sparc >>can beat on a mhz to mhz comparison. And that isn't the end of the story, >>because their mhz is only about 2x behind everyone else and getting further >>behind weekly. 750mhz to 1ghz alphas, PIII/600+'s, and Sun drags up the rear >>with nothing close. And Solaris is not exactly enticing any longer, it has >>more bugs than an abandoned food factory. > >Agreed. The bench marks on the Sparc CPUs are pretty bad. Solaris was the king >of the hill until Linux arrived huh? At one time sun "owned" the workstation market. But they decided to get away from commodity microprocessors (they were a Motorola 680x0 user at first) and designed their own. The rest is history. > >In terms of CAD/CAM what does Linux offer? What packages exit for truly >professional design and industrial manufacturing systems? Are there any systems >the beat out other design systems for other UNIX and/or Windows flavors? > >Thanks. That is a Linux issue. There are some commercial products for Linux. There are more for Solaris. There are _many_ more for Windows. Not being a CAD/CAM person, I don't know what is out for Linux, but I am sure that there are options, although I wouldn't venture to guess how they stack up against Solaris or IRIX software options...
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