During the past year we have completed the conversion of our spectrometer control and processing software, RNMR, to the X window system. All spectrometers and processing stations now use only this version of the program. Previously, most the spectrometer consoles used NDS graphics terminals for displaying spectra and entering commands. We purchased enough new NCD 19cr and Xplora X terminals to provide for all of our spectrometers. Now that all of our systems are using X terminals a major constraint in the further improvement of RNMR has been removed. Although X terminals have the potential for providing a far more powerful and intuitive graphical interface for our users than the previously employed NDS terminals, we were unable to take full advantage of their features due to the need to have one program support both the old and new terminals. During the year we have greatly expanded the use of menues and dialog boxes in RNMR. We expect further major improvements in the future. We have greatly enhanced our computer capabilities during the last year. At the beginning of the period, our primary processing computer was a VAXstation 4000/90. We also had one DEC Alpha 3000/400 which was primarily used for computationally intensive simulations. The six spectrometers were operated by three fairly old and slow VAXstation 3100/30 and 3100/38 computers. Although they were reasonably adequate when driving NDS terminals, they proved quite unsuitable for coping with the demands of multiple X windows terminals. To improve our processing capabilities we purchased two Alphastation 400 4/233 systems. Each of these is about twice as fast as the 3000/400 and ten times as fast as the 4000/90. One is used exclusively for offline RNMR processing and the other for both RNMR processing and solid state spectral simulations. The VAXstation 3100s were replaced by two very inexpensive stripped down Alphastation 200 4/100 computers. These two computers are very competently supporting our seven current spectrometers. In order to be certain that we would be able to support our recently delivered 750 MHz system and soon to be delivered widebore 500 MHz solid state system, we have ordered an additional 4/233 for processing and a 4/100 for spectrometer control. The additional computers will also make it far more likely that we can survive a computer failure without severe disruption to the operation of the facility. To satisy our need for more storage capacity we have purchased an additional three 2.1 Gbyte disk drives in a DEC StorageWorks cabinet. We have also purchased an 8 Gbyte StorageWorks DAT tape drive for backup purposes. With the increase in the number of high speed computers we noticed that we were developing congestion problems in our Ethernet network. We purchased a Lantronix LSB4 four port Ethernet switch to break the network into smaller segments. The switch keeps packets destined for only one segment from reaching the others. It also keeps most of the external MIT traffic off of our network. We purchased two eight port repeaters to work with the switch.
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