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ECN Upgrades Equipment with 3 New NP-1s

Three new Gould NP-1s have been brought on line for the Civil (cn), Grissom (gn), and Mechanical (mn) sites. These new machines will operate in tandem with the Gould PN9080s at each site for the Fall semester then between semesters the Gould PN9080s will be unplugged and returned to Gould as part of the upgrade agreement. By the beginning of Spring semester, the NP- 1s will have absorbed all of the load previously handled by the PN9080s.

• How will this affect you?

  The NP-1 has a cpu that is twice as fast as the PN9080 and possesses 256 megabytes of memory as compared to the 16 megabytes of the PN9080. The NP-1's greater speed and capacity will make it possible for more users at your site to be on the machine without noticeable degradation in performance. Most standard UNIX and ECN tools, including IMSL and Unify, are on the NP-1. An exception is that FORTRAN users will have to use fort, because the f77 compiler is not available on NP-1s (anyone calling f77 on an NP-1 will get the fort compiler by default). Multiplan is not available on the NP-1.

  The NP-1 has a different processor than the PN9080, thus all programs will have to be recompiled before using the new machines.

• What about undergraduate classes?

  All engineering undergraduates at these sites will have NP-1 accounts. If you taught an undergraduate class that used the PN9080, you should take action now to transfer to the NP-1. Remember the PN9080s will be powered down and disappear after the completion of Fall semester. There will be no time for postsemester work.

  HINT: Classes to be taught in Spring and Summer '89 need to complete software conversion now while PN9080s are available for execution verification.

• What about problems?

  It is expected that this transition will be very smooth. We have had an NP-1 in "test" mode on the ECN for the past twelve months and many of the conversion bugs have already been killed. However if you find you are experiencing a problem, please contact your site specialist for help. But a word of warning--site specialists get very, very busy toward the end of a semester--DON'T WAIT--ask for assistance early.

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