The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

The NP-1s are Coming

Next Fall the engineering schools will have more students, more office and lab space, and more computing power. In midsummer ECN will take delivery of three new Gould NP-1 super minicomputers. These new machines will ultimately replace the current Gould 9080 machines in Mechanical, Civil, and Grissom known as MG, CA, and GA. The NP-1 machines are expected to handle more than double the number of logins as the 9080s.

How will this effect you as a user? When the NP-1 machines arrive, ECN will power them up and put them through a series of tests. When ECN feels the new machines are ready, accounts will be installed. The TENTATIVE date for user access is sometime in August or September. Throughout the Fall semester, the NP-1s and the 9080s will run in parallel. This will permit users to take advantage of both machines, thereby; allowing time for users to deal with problems encountered in transferring programs from the 9080's to the NP-1. The TENTATIVE date for shutting down the 9080s is December 28, 1988. The 9080s will be returned to Gould as part of our upgrade-exchange agreement.

The NP-1 is not new to the Engineering Computer Network. The very first experimental model NP-1 that Gould built has been on the network for the past twelve months. Many ECN users are familiar with this NP-1, called EN. The new NP-1s will have the same hardware configuration as EN. They will be delivered with 2 Central Processing Units and 256 megabytes of main memory. Each machine will have 2 network interfaces and a floating point accelerator. The floating point accelerator board contains a vector processor (see vectorization articles, this issue) that is supported through the standard Gould FORTRAN compiler. Disk storage will consist of three Fujitsu single eagle 300 megabyte disk drives. The NP-1 runs an updated version of the UNIX operating system, UTX/3.0.

NOTE: The NP-1 is not binary compatible with the 9080. This means all programs will have to be recompiled after being transferred to the NP-1. If you have large programs or course material that you are now using on MG, CA, or GA you might want to take advantage of EN's current availability and begin testing your programs. Such early testing will allow you to take full advantage of your site's NP-1 as soon as it becomes available to you. Kevin Hurley (login: kevin) is the person to contact to create an account for you on EN.

With a little patience and luck, the NP-1 should offer welcome relief to the overloading problems we have been having with Engineering's increasing computing load.

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