[daip] Radio Astronomy question

[Amy Mioduszewski]

Dear Greg,

Well, it all depends on what you want to do.  I think the Sun system you 
described would probably work but since AIPS is not parallelized it 
would not take full advantage of the 12 processors, so it might run a 
little slow on the 400MHz processors.  A Pentium 4, would work too and 
if it was faster than 400MHz would probably give you better performance. 
  We now support MacOS, as well.  As for diskspace, again, it depends on 
what you want to do.  AIPS itself needs around 700Mb (this is for the 
binary install).

Let me describe my desktop computer, it is a 2.1 GHz Pentium 4 with 60Gb 
disk and runs Redhat(Enterprise) Linux.  The speed is plenty for what I 
usually do, which is VLBA continuum, it would be slow for spectral line 
or huge data sets.  The disk space is barely sufficient, but I usually 
work on many datasets at once and I have other work stuff on the 
computer.  My typical dataset is 1-2Gb.  VLA continuum would be smaller, 
spectral line would be bigger, and note that you need several times the 
size of the dataset to reduce the data in AIPS efficiently.

If you have more questions, please feel free to contact us.

Cheers,

Amy Mioduszewski
Support Scientist
National Radio Astronomy Observatory