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From: ragg0270@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Richard Alan Gerber)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Scientific Software for the Amiga
Keywords: NCSA, science, software
Message-ID: <1990Oct12.135120.13711@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 90 13:51:20 GMT
References: <28709@swrinde.nde.swri.edu>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 38

kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk) writes:


>Well, to the last I can gladly say that the NCSA software is archived
>at at the National Center for SuperComputing Applications at the
>University of Illinois at Urbana Champ.  They placed the code in the
>public domain, and have allowed (encouraged?) other developers to play
>with it.  The source code is usually in "C".  It is available via
>anonymous ftp from zaphon.ncsa.uiuc.edu.  There have been mentions of
>other software & sites recently also.

A typo, I think. Anonymous FTP at NCSA is actually:
zaphod.ncsa.uiuc.edu 
or try:
ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu
or try:
128.174.20.50

There's lot of potentially useful stuff there. They would probably like it
if some of it was ported to the Amiga. They really want their 
software to be used and useful.  NCSA seems to support Cray, Alliant,
Sun, Iris, IBM, and Mac systems (Also VAX running UNIX).
They are very heavily into scientific
visualization with their emphasis now on (someone from NCSA
can correct me if I'm way off base here) software development for Mac
color systems and Silicon Graphics Personal IRIS's. Both Apple and SGI have
made substantial hardware donations to NCSA, to the benefit of both NCSA and
the computer companies in my opinion. 
I don't know for sure if they'd be interested in porting to the Amiga
at the present time, but I'd doubt it.
For one thing the data sets (HDF format) assume either 8 or 24-bit color
images, something the Amiga can't currently display (yes, I know about HAM,
etc. I'm also of the opinion that 256 colors aren't absolutely necessary
for this kind of work, for whatever my opinion is worth.)
Hopefully with time things might change. 

Richard Gerber
gerber@rigel.astro.uiuc.edu