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Computer Upgrades Completed at Kitt Peak (1Sep93) (from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 35, 1 September 1993) The major computer upgrade for data acquisition and reduction begun three summers ago is essentially completed with work carried out during summer shutdown 1993. The overall goals of this upgrade were: o To provide a computing environment which permits effective data acquisition with large format detectors, both IR and optical. o To allow effective data reduction so that astronomers can assess the quality of their observations in nearly real-time and could, if desired, complete the first steps of data reduction at the telescope. At most sites two separate computers are available. The primary machine has the fastest cpu available in the dome, most of the disk and tape resources and is used for data acquisition and reduction. The secondary machine has a modest amount of disk space for local applications and is intended as a console for an astronomer doing data reduction. Cross-mounting disks between the two computers, so that the cpu on the secondary computer could be dedicated to data reduction, proved unacceptable because of slow access of disks between machines and confusion about which machine one was on and where the observations were stored. We now have a mixture of Sun SPARCstation 10s, SPARCstation 2s, and IPXs as the primary and secondary machines with a SS-10 and a SS-2 for spares. System RAM at all telescopes has been increased to minimize page swapping with large format CCDs and mosaics. Disks have been concatenated using Sun's MetaDisk to provide some 4.5 Gbytes of contiguous disk space for storage of observations where large format CCDs are the rule. All domes have nine-track, Exabyte and DAT magnetic tape devices available (the Coud Feed observer shares the 2.1-m DAT drive). Installation of the X windows environment has been delayed until some time during the fall semester pending completion of Ximtool and release 2.10.3 of IRAF with its modifications for X-based applications. Bruce Bohannan, Steve Grandi (for a cast of thousands)
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