[Vis5d-users] Dream vis5d intel/amd box?

[Neil R. S. <ne...@ar...>]

What would be your dream Intel/AMD platform and OS for vis5d? And
if you couldn't have that, then what would be a second, and then 
maybe a third choice? 

And for grins, let's say in addition to the processor, Intel or AMD,
you were confined to a Unix-variant OS that would need to do NFS 
client mounts of data filesystems from SGI IRIX and Compaq True64 
(Digital Unix). You would be thinking in terms of a teaching
lab of, say, 20 such beasts, and a budget cap of say $3500-4000 each.

I would like to direct this primarily to the vis5d creators and 
its maintainors, but would also like to hear anyone's desired 
configuration based on your experiences and knowledge of the
software and its usages.

I assume that an optimum machine/OS selection would be based on
the best match of processor/chip set speed and compilers that know 
how to take best advantage of its optimization features to do the 
vis5d program tasks. Next (or firstly) might be graphics and display 
considerations with proven driver stability for the OS and hardware 
match. There are certainly more items of critical cnosideration
and I'd like to hear them, too.

As you can easily guess, I'm planning for an atmospheric sciences 
teaching lab concerned primarily with synoptic scale data analysis 
and model display and exploration. That would include the 
operational model data sets but also MM5 model explorations, too. 
That might give an idea of minimum L1,L2,RAM & VRAM.

Many thanks in advance to all who might chime in. -Neil
-- 
Neil R. Smith, Comp. Sys. Mngr.		ne...@ar...
Dept. Atmospheric Sci., Texas A&M Univ.	979/845-6272 FAX:979/862-4466