Astronomical Image Processing System: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:19, 17 December 2009

Revision as of 01:24, 14 May 2010

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===The Blacksburg Connection===

In the fall of 1993, NRAO got a query from a radio astronomer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, requesting permission for one of his students to copy AIPS to his PC for an attempted port to a new system called Linux. (At that time, AIPS was still proprietary code, released to non-profit organizations under a rather cumbersome license and user agreement; this changed later.) Polite skepticism was the immediate reaction of most people then in the NRAO AIPS group, but they allowed the experiment to go ahead. Within several weeks Jeff Uphoff had successfully ported the software to Linux and was able to run the “Dirty Dozen Tasks” benchmark, even though it took much about a day on ana 386 compared towith an hour on a SPARC processor.

===Faster and Faster, and Make it GNU===