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20030407: a quick question

>From:  David Fitzgerald <address@hidden>
>Organization:  Millersville University
>Keywords:  200304071914.h37JES7U004560 Student lab

Hi Dave,

It never ceases to amaze me how fast email can get buried in my inbox
to the point of my overlooking it.  Sorry for the delay in responding!

>This isn't a support question per se, so I'm emailing you directly.  I want
>to re-arrange our synoptic lab in such a way as to have it become a true
>computer center for our students and yet allow it to remain a traditional
>classroom when needed.  In other words, I'd like to have computer access at
>each seat in the room, without having the monitor/CPU/keyboard hogging up
>desk space or blocking the view of the blackboard.  

I have seen pictures of some labs that have the monitors sunk down int
the desktop.  The monitor is the major thing that blocks view of
the whiteboard and/or instructor.

>My thought was to put in "dumb" terminals with flat screens that could be
>folded down when not in use and have them all connected to a main server set
>up just for the synoptic lab. The server would have to be able to serve 26
>seats all running IDV/GARP/McIDAS etc. simultaneously and be able to serve
>out the display to all the nodes without any loss of performance.  Knowing
>how IDV is a CPU and memory hog, could you offer any recommended
>configuration for this server that would allow what I'd like to do?  How
>about the terminals at the seats, have you seen anything similar to what I'd
>like to do?

I don't know if anyone has thought about what it would take to run 26
simultaneous IDV invocations from a single server given its memory use
when folks start loading 3D animations.  Also, I don't know of many
reasonably priced servers that could handle 26 simultaneous instances
of GEMPAK or McIDAS for that matter.  As far as I can tell, the
ordering of how much each application would use reads as:

1 - IDV      (because of 3D rendering)
2 - GEMPAK   (because entire satellite images are loaded for animation)
3 - McIDAS   (uses the least of all three)

Is it out of the question for folks to run their own workstations?
This would seem to be the most cost effective approach given that PC
workstations are so affordable lately.

If this not possible, then I think you are looking at a server with
multiple processors (at least 4 and more likely 8 or 16) and LOTS of
RAM (like 16 or 32 GB).  My feeling that "main stream" machines that
could support this are expensive.  I will have to touch base with our
system administrator, Mike Schmidt to see what the new 4-processor Sun
(SunFire 480R) cost.  It has 16 GB of RAM, so it could get us in the
ballpark for how much things might cost.

Again, sorry it took so long for me to get back to you.  I was in
DC all last week attending the Internet-2 conference.

Tom
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