Subject: Re: CCL:Do the Windows NT have any impact on the comp chem field?

From: Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 18:33:00 +0200 (DFT)

> My question is now whether Windows NT and Linux already play a significant
> role in the computation chemistry field? Are the Windows NT and Linux

As for Linux, I'd say definitely yes. From a technical point of view,
a PC running Linux is just another member of the big Unix family, with
most of the common Unix software available, including more and more
commercial programs. Due to their excellent price-performance ratio,
more and more research groups are using Linux machines, at least for
use personal workstations, and sometimes even in clusters for heavy
number crunching.

As for Windows NT, the future is more difficult to predict. Most of
the computational science software comes from the Unix world, and
porting it to NT is not trivial. Moreover, most people will have to
work with some Unix variety anyway for heavy-duty computing, and this
won't change in the foreseeable future (has Cray already announced an
NT version of the T3E?). So using NT means learning two systems, with
no immediate advantage. I expect computational scientists to stick to
Unix for the same reason that office users stick to Windows:
familiarity and availability of application programs. An exception
might be dedicated graphics machines, for which the operating system
doesn't matter much.

The main market I see for NT is people whose job description is
science management rather than active science. They might prefer NT
for its better provision with office software, and want a certain
range of scientific applications (mostly visualization) as well.
This could be the group that SGI is aiming at with its announced
NT machines.
-- 
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: [email-masked]
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