Subject: POWERMAC clones for compchem

From: [email-masked] (Eilert Ofstead)
Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 15:37:09 -0500

To follow-up on the recent comments of John Nash (1-5-96):

>It would be foolish, I think, to ignore the Power Macintosh
>as such a system based on long-held OS biases as to what a "real PC" is.
>Until recently, there was a need for a good FORTRAN compiler on this
>platform; the arrival of Language Systems FORTRAN makes the PowerMac a quite
>viable system for quant. mech. development.  GAMESS for PowerMac is a full
>port of that computational package,
>and it runs at about 1/3 the speed of an RS/6000 model 350 on a PM 7100/66.
>See http://www.msg.ameslab.gov/GAMESS/dist.mac.html for details.  I hope
>that developers will not ignore this platform with its obvious strengths and
>cost-to-performance advantages.

I wonder if this suggestion might be extended to include the DayStar
Genesis MP machine, which is a 4-cpu 604-chip parallizable machine for
under 20,000$, I believe.  This could potentially be a pretty interesting
alternative in this market, it would seem.

Any thoughts?

Eilert Ofstead

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