Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:21:55 09/14/99
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On September 14, 1999 at 17:22:35, Zachariah Amela wrote: >>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. :) >> > >Wowzer!! The kind of technologies those guys most get to use on a daily basis >makes my head spin. That would be quite cool. Livermore is astounding... The federal government doesn't insure computer centers... and they have standing orders of (the last time I was there) no more than 50 million dollars of computers in one building, so that if a fire hits, it doesn't wipe out half the world's computer. As a result, they had (the last time I was there) 4 rooms about the size of a normal wal-mart, each full of computers (Crays), tape drives, disk drives, robot tape archives, etc. Nice to see all that stuff. Nice to see a computer room so big you can't see the other side of it. :) > >What department where those two engaged in? LANL is a BIG facility. Just >curios. They have quite a bit of different weapon development going on there. > Harry was in the C division, that is the basic computational section. He spent his time helping others tweak their month-long executions down to a week or less. With lots of assembly programming, hand optimizing the FORTRAN source, etc... Burt is a mathematician, again involved in computer programming although I believe he has retired from Los Alamos although he still lives in that City. Harry has also semi-retired, but goes to the lab a couple of days a week still... Neither touch plutonium so far as I know. :) >> >> >>>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... >> > >Not great? What problem area's does IRIX have? I've been told for imaging, it >is superb. Does it fail in other aspects? It is just a bare-bones unix, is all I can say. Not particularly resistant to breaking in, not particulary interoperable with other systems like Solaris and so forth (ie NIS/NIS+, etc.). > >> >>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. >> > > >So jumping ship to Sparc did them in huh? Why didn't they go to x86 or a hybrid >adaption of the x86? Why did SunOS go the way of the dinosaur, and why was it >replaced by Solaris? W/ Sun's deep pockets they could have at least released >something comparible to the Alpha. While on the subject, what is it that Oracle >boxes use now? No idea why they decided to do their own chip. Totally stupid move. Oracle runs on lots of things including Linux... so a quad xeon will make a devil of an Oracle server... or an 8-way xeon if you have the money... Or even bigger on alpha... > >>> >>>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... > >As you know, I have been poking around for alternative OS's. So far Linux is >hands down on top of my list. I did find one CAD program for Linux, but I >wasn't exactly inspired. I could have looked more into it, but....ya know. > >Also, what type development environment in Linux would you suggest to a (gasp!) >professional VB developer? xbasic? Is it any good? Can I truly port code; or >is it like 99% of other importable basic compilers I know? > >Well, thanks Dr. Hyatt. You really can fill a guy in on the details. I don't do basic stuff... I am a C fan from years back of course, and am perfectly happy using VI for the editor, gdb for the debugger, although xdb is pretty good if you like to point and click a lot. I don't like 'programming environments' because unix shell programming gives me so much power, and the point-and-click interface hides most of it..
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