[daip] Radio Astronomy question

[Alheid, Gregory]

Sirs,

I'm a member of Amateur Astronomers Association of 
Pittsburgh (AAAP) and I know that our group is 
interested in doing Radio Astronomy.

My question has to do with the computer resources 
needed to do this work. I have previously looked 
at the AIPS software used by NRAO and that it is 
provided to run on Sun Microsystems hardware as 
well as Linux systems.

Anyway the company I work for is retiring Sun E6500 
and E5000 systems with twelve 400 MHz processors each. 

Are these Sun systems overkill to run the AIPS software 
or would a Pentium IV be adequate for this task.

Also what are the disk storage requirements to do this? 

Thank you for your time,

Greg Alheid
Operating System Engineer
UPMC Health System