[24168] in Hotline Meeting
Re: VAXes at MIT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jmilgram@minnow.mit.edu)
Sat Sep 10 15:16:02 1994
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Cc: hsolmez@titanic.mit.edu, jmilgram@minnow.mit.edu, mingqi@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 94 15:19:23 PDT
From: jmilgram@minnow.mit.edu
When MIT had the VAX 9000 Patriot running we ran a great many programs
which made a similarly great pile of results. Those results were
mostly written as binary files to make them as compact as possible.
When we need to access any of the results, we need to read the files
with a Vax station because (we have been led to believe) Dec Stations
have a different file arrangement and cannot read the VAX binary
files. Just a week ago we had to access the files and did so
sucessfully with a Project Athena Vax.
Yesterday, I learned that Project Athena is replacing all Vax Stations
with Dec stations. In fact, in our Ocean Engineering cluster this is
supposed to happen in the next couple of days.
Although we could keep one Vax station in lieu of a Dec station, that
would be most inefficient since the students who use the cluster need
all the computing power they can get and we need access to the files
rarely.
Since the files were made on systems supported by Project Athena, I
wonder if someone there could convert our files to a form that could
be read by Dec Stations, or whatever machines you are planning to keep
supporting.
The files were generated by Dr. Olmez who now resides in Turkey.
However, he has Internet access so he could provide you with a
description of the data arrangement in the files.
Any other procedure which retains ability to get at the binary data
files would be acceptable. On the other hand, we don't think we
should be denied access to data files whose generation involved
man-years of effort.
Please let me know you recommendations on how to handle the issue.
J. H. Milgram
